IN JUNE 2001, as he flew to his first visit with George W. Bush, newly elected Japanese premier Junichiro Koizumi called himself “a diehard pro-American from long before.” It was “fate,” he told reporters, that his maiden foreign trip as prime minister was to the United States. He soon built a close rapport with Bush, and went on to back the United States on the war in Iraq, contributing more than 500 noncombat troops.
This week Koizumi will again meet Bush in Washington (as well as paying homage to his musical idol, Elvis Presley, in Memphis). It will be his last formal stop at the White House before his term expires in September, when Koizumi, 64, is set to retire. The world looks far different today than it did during the initial, pre-9/11 Bush-Koizumi summit. Yet the U.S.-Japan alliance is stronger than ever.
Not all the credit for this diplomatic accomplishment goes to the Bush administration. The Clinton Defense Department upgraded defense ties, prodded Tokyo to loosen its pacifist straitjacket, and encouraged the Japanese to adopt a more normal foreign policy. “There has been continuity in policy for over ten years,” says Joseph Nye, an assistant Pentagon secretary under Clinton, though the pace was slower in the Clinton years, impeded by trade rows and the emphasis on a “strategic partnership” with China.
In 2000, Nye helped draft the so-called Armitage-Nye Report along with several future Bush officials, including James Kelly, Michael Green, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Armitage. A private study that served as the new administration’s template for relations with Japan, it called for “improving, reinvigorating, and refocusing” the alliance and urged increased cooperation on missile defense, military integration, intelligence-sharing, U.S. base restructuring on Okinawa, and support for systemic economic reforms in Japan.
In Koizumi, the administration found an eager partner. Building on the work of predecessors who had begun embracing a more robust security posture during the mid-1990s, Koizumi brought a fresh boldness to the project, and he meshed well with Bush. “Americans should think of him as a cowboy–in a positive sense,” says Dan Blumenthal, a former Pentagon official. “We’re closer than we’ve ever been,” says Princeton professor Aaron Friedberg, a former adviser to Vice President Cheney.
A decade before, none of this had seemed inevitable. Japan was then a bogeyman of U.S. politics. Japanese companies were buying Columbia Pictures and Rockefeller Center, Honda and Toyota were “stealing” American jobs, the United States had a massive trade deficit with Japan, there was even talk of a resurgent Japanese nationalism. “The United States is rapidly becoming a colony of Japan,” warned Maryland representative Helen Bentley in 1990.
Meanwhile, the security alliance began to fray. Japan sat out the first Gulf war, sending money instead of men. During the 1993-94 flare-up of the intractable North Korean nuclear problem, Japanese obstinacy made things worse. “We were not in sync with them,” says Friedberg. “They were much more in their older mode of not wanting to rock the boat.”
Three big factors changed attitudes in Washington and nudged Japan in a pro-American direction. First, the Japanese economy plunged into deflation and recession, while the U.S. economy began to boom. This helped quell some of the 1980s-era trade spats and forced Japan to accept economic reform. Second, China emerged as the budding superpower in East Asia. The Chinese launched missiles near Taiwan in the summer of 1995 and again in March 1996, prior to historic Taiwanese elections. One month later, President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto signed a joint declaration on regional security. Third, North Korea continued its sabre-rattling, most aggressively in August 1998, when it test-fired a Taepodong-1 rocket over Japan. This ignited a more fervent Japanese push to build missile defenses in concert with the Pentagon.
Then the war on terrorism accelerated things. After 9/11, despite its pacifist constitution, Tokyo sent its maritime Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to the Indian Ocean to provide logistical aid and fuel during the fight against the Taliban. In December 2001, Japanese ships chased and sank a North Korean spy vessel. Two years later, Koizumi crossed the Rubicon: Against public opinion, he deployed a small SDF contingent to do noncombat relief work in southern Iraq–the first time since World War II that Japan had sent troops to a country where conflict still raged, and without explicit U.N. approval.
Last week Koizumi announced the end of the Japanese deployment, noting that Iraqi forces had taken over the relevant bit of Muthanna province. Japan will not leave Iraq altogether; it will actually expand its airlift support into Baghdad and Erbil. But the return home of Japanese ground troops, their mission completed, marks a watershed. This more active role in global security is part of Koizumi’s legacy to his successor.
Who will that be? The smart money is on either Shinzo Abe, the chief cabinet secretary, or his predecessor, Yasuo Fukuda. Like Koizumi, both are members of the Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which has ruled Japan almost continuously since 1955. Fukuda, who turns 70 in July, represents the old guard of the LDP, with its factionalism, pork-barrel spending, and opaque backroom dealing. Abe, 51, is more a Koizumi-style populist: hawkish, market-friendly, and charismatic.
Though he is still the favorite, Abe has dipped in the polls of late. Many attribute this to Japan’s sour relations with China and South Korea. Beijing and Seoul object to Koizumi’s annual pilgrimage to the Yasukuni shrine, a memorial to fallen Japanese soldiers that also honors over a dozen Class-A war criminals. Abe has traditionally favored the pilgrimage. But in a recent interview with the Financial Times, he hedged, saying, “I have no intention whatsoever to make a declaration that I will go to the shrine.”
His comment may reflect shifting views in Japan. Whatever their thoughts on Yasukuni, most Japanese don’t want China or South Korea bossing them around. “It is something that we should decide ourselves,” a senior Japanese diplomat told me. But there are growing fears in Japan that Yasukuni may be pinching business interests and bruising Japan’s image abroad. In early May, a prominent group of Japanese corporate executives, Keizai Doyukai, counseled against shrine visits. (After all, Japan now does more bilateral trade with China than it does with America.)
“Fukuda will be much more attuned to others in East Asia,” predicts former State Department official James Kelly. Indeed, Fukuda opposes visiting Yasukuni. And his father, former Japanese premier Takeo Fukuda, preached regional rapprochement during the late 1970s. On the other hand, Abe is far more pragmatic than his firebrand image suggests. “Japan is not a militarist society,” says Joseph Nye. “This is not the 1930s.” Still, the Chinese consider Yasukuni a wedge issue with which they can disturb U.S.-Japan relations and remind all Asians of dark parts of Japanese history.
However the shrine issue plays out in the future, argues Balbina Hwang, a Japan expert at the Heritage Foundation, the Bush-Koizumi era will prove to have marked the postwar apex of U.S.-Japan ties.
Post-Koizumi, America will still have to iron out the details of troop reshuffling on Okinawa. There will be renewed wrangling over beef exports. The White House will again squeeze Japan to curb its investments in Iranian oil fields–a squabble that could get serious if America pursues U.N. sanctions. And unless Tokyo revises Article 9 of its pacifist constitution, future efforts at “collective self-defense” may be hindered.
Three structural realities, meanwhile, should keep the alliance strong: the war on terrorism, the rise of China, and the North Korean missile threat. What cannot reasonably be expected is the kind of personal warmth between two heads of state that has flourished in the Bush-Koizumi years.
Duncan Currie is a reporter for The Weekly Standard.
