After it became obvious a few months ago that Yukio Hatoyama, the leader of the Democratic Party of Japan, was likely to become his country’s next Prime Minister, clever people all over the world naturally became very curious about him.
One can picture the scenes in Vauxhall and Langley, the MoD and the Pentagon, as top spooks and senior diplomats sent their minions scurrying to find out more about this man who will soon become the leader of the world’s second richest country and a pivotal military ally of the United States.
The answer came as something of a shock. In speeches and interviews, Mr Hatoyama, who will be formally elected Prime Minister on September 18, articulated a view of Japan’s international role very different from the one that the world has become used to hearing from Japanese leaders. Rather than benign blandness, he took a sceptical view of Japan’s economic and military relations with the United States, which hinted at — without ever fully owning up to — something close to anti-Americanism. After a DPJ victory unprecedented in Japanese history, it now becomes an urgent question: what is Yukio Hatoyama’s foreign policy going to look like?
The greatest anxiety of all has been caused by an essay, originally written for the Japanese magazine Voice, which has been carried in translation by US newspapers. In it, Mr Hatoyama expresses doubts about two institutions that many people would regard as the foundation of Japan’s post-war success: market-based global capitalism and the US-Japan alliance.
He denounced “unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism that are void of morals or moderation” under which “people are treated not as an end but as a means”. He acknowledged the importance of the US alliance but insisted that East Asia “must be recognised as Japan’s basic sphere of being” and that Japan and its smaller Asian neighbours must “restrain US political and economic excesses”. And he foresaw, with a hint of relish, a day when the dollar would no longer be the world’s global unit of exchange, and when Asia would have its own global currency.
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Two days after becoming Prime Minister in waiting, Mr Hatoyama is distancing himself from these sentiments with almost comic vigour. For all the pungency of his remarks, he is no position to establish any significant distance from the US and nor would the majority of Japanese want him too.
The Japan-US alliance has survived the Cold War intact because it still suits both its partners beautifully. The US gets a strategic base on the edge of what is becoming one of the world’s richest, and most unstable, continents — and the costs of maintaining its marine bases and carrier fleet are handsomely offset by the Japanese taxpayer.
Japan, in turn, has for the past 64 years had the best protection that money, as well as goodwill, can buy — and it has profited enormously from it. Relieved of the burden of defending itself (the Self-Defence Forces are designed to be no more than auxiliaries to the US military), it has been able to concentrate most successfully on simply getting rich.
At various times, such as the 1950s and 1960s, Japan has engaged in a public debate on alternatives to this arrangement — such as a Swiss-type neutrality or independent rearmament. Rarely have those options seemed less desirable than they do now. China is stealthily establishing a military with offensive potential. North Korea is testing nuclear weapons. However worthy the goal of closer engagement with Asia, the notion that these could ever be substituted for US protection is absurd — as Mr Hatoyama knows. So what does he refer to when he promises a “more equal” relationship with the US?
He seems to mean a tinkering with the small print of the treaty: the subsidy that Japan contributes to the upkeep and maintenance of the bases; the cost of relocating a Marine base from Japan to the US island of Guam; and the legal protocols that allow US servicemen who commit crimes to escape Japanese justice in some circumstances.
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These are issues that appeal to Japanese voters — as well as to the left wing of his own party. But they are struggles that, now he has safely been elected, Mr Hatoyama can afford to postpone for the time being, or discreetly shelve.
He has much more urgent battles to win — with the flailing Japanese economy, tentatively returning to growth but stricken with record unemployment; and with his own bureaucracy, whose power he has promised to rein in. Next summer he must fight another election, for the less powerful upper house of the Japanese Diet; he will have no wish to add to his troubles — and he will reap no benefit — by alienating his country’s great ally. When he meets Barack Obama in Washington later this month, it will be all smiles and reaffirmation of one of the 20th century’s most successful, and trouble-free, alliances.
It is not entirely clear why Mr Hatoyama has gone as far as he has in publishing his article in English. There is speculation that he was not fully aware that it was to appear, as it did, on the New York Times website. Yesterday, anyway, he was busy emphasising that it is the expression of a “dream” rather than a policy. Rather than being anti-American, it appears that Mr Hatoyama is just an inept manipulator of the media — although in today’s world, that may be just a serious.