Troubled Alliance

[ 3 ] roundtable • a new stage for the u.s.-japan alliance? Troubled Alliance Kenneth B. Pyle Japan and the United States are observing the 50th anniversary of the revised Mutual Security Treaty, which they signed in 1960. Rather than an occasion for celebration, however, the anniversary has revealed deep tensions within the alliance. The new administration headed by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which in last summer’s election toppled the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) after more than half a century of one-party rule, seem determined to bring about a reshaping of the alliance fundamentals. Hatoyama and the DPJ have called for a more equal alliance, for a loosening of the ties, so that Japan can be freer of alliance obligations in order to draw closer to its Asian neighbors. Tensions between Washington and Tokyo have focused on the issue of the relocation of a marine air base in Okinawa, but that has simply been the expression of a much bigger disagreement about the future of the alliance. The new Japanese leaders have variously asserted their support for an East Asian Community that would exclude the United States, and they have favored a drawdown of the U.S. forces garrisoned since the end of the occupation, a review of the status of forces agreement and of host-nation support, and publication of hitherto secret alliance agreements. Although lacking coherence and consistency, their assertions nonetheless reflect a will to establish a new equilibrium for the alliance. These intentions of the new government bespeak a reawakening to the goals of autonomy and self-mastery that Japan has pursued since the middle of the nineteenth century when it lost the self-sufficiency and free security that it had always enjoyed. This pursuit of autonomy and self-mastery was the motivation of the Meiji Restoration; it was also the motivation for war in 1941. The diplomatic documents of that time are replete with the phrase jiei jison (autonomy and self-defense). To determine its own fate was what Japan aspired to. But the war ended in the utter annihilation of Japanese sovereignty and self-identity, and postwar Japanese history has proved to be a tortuous and protracted struggle to gain a measure of autonomy. The alliance has made Japan a military satellite, some would even say a client kenneth b. pyleis the Henry M. Jackson Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Washington and author of Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose. He can be reached at . [ 4 ] asia policy state, of the United States and has been a main theme of public debate in Japan for more than 50 years. The alliance has been managed by the elites of both countries, but an inevitable reconsideration of its terms and assumptions is now caught up in the new democratic politics in Japan. I say “inevitable” because the degree of U.S. domination in the relationship has been so extreme that a recalibration of the alliance was bound to happen, but also because autonomy and selfmastery have always been fundamental goals of modern Japan. In dealing with the DPJ’s new policies, it is important that Americans maintain a historical awareness and a self-awareness, both of the postwar American hegemony over most aspects of Japanese life and of the way in which this domination has shaped Japanese behavior. This is a strange and anomalous alliance between two countries of utterly different histories and values, born out of a bitter and merciless war and out of an unnatural intimacy that began with the U.S. occupation of Japan. The peculiar nature of the alliance must first, in my estimation, be sought in Franklin Roosevelt’s radical and unprecedented wartime goal of the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers. Rather than fight the war to an armistice and a negotiated peace agreement as all other wars in U.S. history have been fought, this would be fought to total victory. Rather than a war, as Clausewitz would have it, fought to achieve the concrete goals that diplomacy had failed to achieve, this would be fought until the enemy agreed to surrender its...