Obama's Japan Headache

TOKYO — President Obama has a Japan problem. I know, it’s not an issue that keeps him up at night. But when U.S. ties with its most important Asian ally get ugly over security rather than semiconductors, the world must be changing.

Certainly Japan is. Having voted out the shoguns of the Liberal Democratic Party who ruled for more than a half-century, and declared war on the bureaucracy that greased the pork-barrel deals of that long dominion, the Japanese are taking a new look at the power that wrote their Constitution and underwrote their assumptions: the United States.

As a result there are troubles. Reliable Japan is now restive Japan. It’s talking about a more “equal partnership” — read less subservient. Acquiescence has given way to argument.

I find that normal in that Japan has just gone through a political change as dramatic in its way as any post-Cold-War demolition of a single-party dominated, American-backed status quo.

Still, the troubles between the world’s two largest economies are proving unexpectedly sharp. Ministers here shake their heads and mutter “really bad.” On the face of it, Obama and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who guided the upstart Democratic Party to victory last September, have much in common, including change. Bad blood was not inevitable.

Both leaders swept into office on the back of middle class malaise at falling incomes and job insecurity. The Japanese salaryman and the American working stiff have shared a lousy decade.

Both leaders hover in the center despite left-of-center inclinations and ideals. Both face the task of adjusting their countries’ expectations to a world in which their relative power is eroding. True, Obama was the ultimate outsider whereas Hatoyama is the scion of a Kennedy-like political dynasty (and heir to the Bridgestone tire fortune). But shared concerns might have trumped differences of background.

Instead, trust has dissolved faster than wasabi in soy sauce. The spark has been the future of a Marine air station in the southern island of Okinawa, where local feelings run high over the noise, crime and pollution many associate with the U.S. military presence. The deeper issue is more complex: growing Japanese restiveness over postwar dependency on Washington of which the most visible symbol is the 37,000 American troops here.

Hatoyama has given voice to that chafing. He campaigned with a pledge of greater assertiveness, questioning a 2006 deal to relocate the Futenma air station to a pristine site in the north of the island (environmentalists in his party are incensed), suggesting the base should be moved off the island or even out of Japan. He has also talked about a revision of the Constitution whose Article 9 denies Japan a full-fledged military.

“We take the U.S.-Japan alliance very seriously, it’s the heart of our foreign policy, although Hatoyama used to talk about an alliance without permanent bases and that may confuse our U.S. friends a bit,” said Akihisa Nagashima, the vice minister of defense. “Now I believe Hatoyama does not think we should kick out U.S. troops — never, not at all.”

But doubts have been sown on the American side. They’ve multiplied through misunderstanding. When the president was here last month, Hatoyama appealed for trust, Obama said sure, but they never cleared up what the mutual trust was about. To Hatoyama, it was the future of the alliance. To Obama it was the implementation of the $26 billion 2006 Okinawa accord.

That was a disastrous little ambiguity. Now everyone’s unhappy. A high-level working group on the Marine base, announced by Obama, has fallen apart.

My conversations here suggest Hatoyama’s not going to make a final decision for months, perhaps not before upper house elections next July that could liberate him of his left-wing junior coalition partners. Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state who’s been running around town, is only the most visible expression of U.S. impatience. Obama shares it.

“I can’t change the political situation here,” Nagashima said, referring to the Okinawan anger and coalition pressure on Hatoyama. “I really want our American friends to accept and work with us despite these difficulties.”

That’s sound advice. Having just taken 90-plus days over an Afghan decision, Obama can’t dismiss Hatoyama as a ditherer. He’s taken the reins after more than five decades of the L.D.P shogunate. He needs time — and the whiff of a campaign financing scandal is not helping him.

The deeper forces behind Hatoyama’s victory and the Futenma imbroglio are these. Japan, like Germany before it, wants to move out from under American tutelage. Unlike Germany, however, it inhabits a part of the world where a Cold War vestige — nuclear-armed North Korea — endures and fast-rising China with its growing military is just across the water.

In short, the need for the Japan-U.S. alliance is real even if the Japanese urge for liberation from its more demeaning manifestations is growing. That says to me that everyone should take a deep breath. U.S. impatience should be curbed along with the pie-in-the-sky “world of fraternity” musings of elements in Hatoyama’s party. Be flexible on Futenma but unyielding on the strategic imperative binding America and Japan.