Nothing to Fear

For half a century, the United States and Japan have been pals across the Pacific. Whenever officials from both countries meet, they almost always hail the U.S.-Japan alliance as "the cornerstone" of America's foreign policy in Asia and boast how it is "one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world." But the ouster this week of the party that has governed Japan since 1955—and the arrival of a group that occasionally badmouths America's role in the region—has frightened people that the happy days have come to an end. They should relax. (Story continued below...)

By all appearances, the signs are bad. The incoming Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has pledged to take an independent line with Washington—and has consequently petrified observers that it will undermine the military alliance between the two largest economies of the world. During the election campaign, the DPJ said it would stop a program in which Japanese vessels refuel U.S. warships in the Indian Ocean for the war on terror, and that they would renegotiate the relocation of a controversial Marine airfield in Okinawa. Another worry is that, by forming a coalition with leftist parties, the DPJ's foreign policy will be hampered by them. But what especially ruffled feathers in Washington are the excerpts of an essay by Yukio Hatoyama, the presumptive prime minister-elect, which appeared in the op-ed pages of The New York Times late last month. At first glance, it reads like an anti-American rant by an antiglobalization activist; it elicited an editorial in The Washington Post earlier this week warning that Tokyo shouldn't "seek a rupture with Washington."

The paranoia is understandable, given that a complete change of administrations is virtually unprecedented in Japan; it just happens to be wrong. Washington and Tokyo will surely have their difficulties—the Indian Ocean refueling program chief among them—but the fact is that Hatoyama isn't at all the radical he appears to be. For one thing, his essay was excerpted largely out of context from a longer Japanese manuscript. The gist of the entire essay was that Hatoyama wants to address the darker effects of globalization rather than reject it altogether. In fact, he admits in the Japanese version of his essay that "in today's age we cannot avoid economic globalization."

For another, Hatoyama is hardly anti-American. In his younger days, he was an aspiring academic—what lured him into politics was the exuberance of American patriotism he witnessed at the 1976 Independence Day parade while he was a student at Stanford. In 1998, he told a seminar promoting Asian cooperation that he is "a big fan of America." Hatoyama is also one of the first Japanese politicians to embrace Barack Obama. He borrowed the president's mantra of change during his own campaign, and just minutes after his party's victory was secured last Sunday, Hatoyama said he wants to follow Obama's lead on global "dialogue and cooperation."

The main source of hand-wringing across the Pacific is simply that the DPJ still hasn't outlined its foreign policy (it could take months), and its cabinet members won't be announced for another two weeks. As journalists and pundits scour for clues on the their foreign policy, the fine print in the DPJ's manifesto has been overlooked in favor of more inflammatory campaign promises, such as the Indian Ocean program and a possible reduction of the American footprint in Okinawa. But critics fail to note that the DPJ foresaw this problem and specifically swore to "determine its role with the United States and actively fulfill Japan's global responsibility."