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A SENSE OF ASIA

Japan's heightened role in U.S. strategy


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

August 19, 2004

Amidst the political caterwaling set off by President BushÕs reference to long known U.S. plans for trimming conventional forces on many of the old Cold War stamping grounds, less notice is taken of JapanÕs unique role. Not only is American deployment there not up for reductions, but U.S. Òboots on the groundÓ are to be reinforced.

As part of the PentagonÕs worldwide ÒtransformationÓ, the U.S. has proposed significant realignment to Japanese officials. The U.S. has apparently proposed merging the GHQ of the 13th Air Force in Guam [which deploys as far as the Mideast] with the 5th Air Force now near Tokyo. The U.S. I Corps Rapid Deployment Force covering Asia-Pacific, based at Fort Lewis, Washington, would move to Japan. The U.S. would replace the Kitty Hawk, homeported at Yokosuka, the last conventional powered aircraft carrier to be decommissioned, with a nuclear powered flattop. The long politically aggravated Marines Okinawa concentration would be mitigated with dispersals elsewhere in Japan. How much this would boost U.S. Forces, Japan, totals isnÕt clear. It currently counts 58,475 U.S. service members ø 1,905 soldiers, 20,605 Marines, 14,765 airmen and 21,200 sailors.

But Japan as a jump-off place meshes with worldwide strategy in which mobility and new technologies replace heavier garrisons. The U.S. has already announced withdrawal of 13,000 of 37,000 U.S. troops in neighboring South Korea, to be ÒreplacedÓ by missiles and periodic deployment of American rapid deployment forces.

The Japan moves will not be easy. Although Prime Minister Koizumi has gone very far toward cooperating with American worldwide strategy, the new proposals will meet opposition. For example, the long history of friction between the Marines and the Okinawans gives rise to Ònot in my neighborhoodÕ responses from other possible venues. Japan, theoretically, prohibited nuclear weapons from entering its territory ø and that taboo has been said to extend to nuclear powered ships.

But Koizumi pushed through a more mutual revision of the codicils of the U.S.-Japan Defense Treaty signed in 1970. He dispatched Japanese Aegis destroyers during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. A Japanese Iraq contingent has gone for peacekeeping and reconstruction, however hunkered down. Japan has joined the Proliferation Security Initiative by helping to police the strategic Malacca Straits.

Perhaps most important, Japan has committed itself to regional anti-missile defense developed jointly with the U.S. JapanÕs electronics industry may even be a components and missiles source. That, again, would have to jump another hurdle: JapanÕs weapons export ban. With one of the largest military budgets [although skewed by JapanÕs acquisitions policy], that is not idle speculation. Japan pays nearly half of all the the U.S. military on shore, including salaries for Japanese staff at U.S. bases and utilities ø 244 billion yen [$2.23 billion].

Japanese pacifists have been quick to criticize the proposed deployments. Hiromichi Umebayashi, president of Peace Depot, says: "The message is more political than quantitative. By concentrating command functions in Japan, the level of cooperation between the Self-Defense Forces and the U.S. military would increase.Ó Umebayashi, like other Japanese anti-war activists, sees the growing military collaboration as violating Article 9 Òno warÓ clause of its postwar constitution. The prohibition has been bent, twisted, and spun since the North Korean attack in 1950 turned Japan into a U.S. base. And the North Korean surprise missile flight test over Japan into the Pacific in 1998 has honed the arguments in favor of more not less cooperative defense with the U.S..

Koizumi argued it was time to call a gun a gun, the self-defense forces should be renamed, to remove the no war clause, to build a memorial to JapanÕs war dead replacing the state Shinto shrine [where some World War II convicted war criminals are buried]. Yasukuni visits by Koizumi has stirred Japanese critics [particularly its tiny Christian community who see it as a violation of post-WWI church and state separation] and foreign victims of the Japanese militarists [not the least the Chinese who wave the bloody shirt]. But domestic politics and his thin majority have scotched these Òtidying upÓ efforts.

So U.S.-Japan strategic collaboration will have its bumps. For example, Tokyo, under pressure for access to oil from its business community, has just told Washington it will continue to invest in Iran despite WashingtonÕs public calls to help isolate Tehran in its attempt to go nuclear. And that for a Japan which has made blocking nuclear proliferation one of its foreign policy fundamentals! Nor is it clear that Koizumi is not straying when he makes humiliating visits to North Korea and promises aid [ahead of an agreed guaranteed disarmament, the U.S. line]. But the Iran caper is not less than British [otherwise stalwart ally] Foreign Minister StrawÕs ÒEU initiativeÓ which blocked WashingtonÕs attempt to get the Iran question to the Security Council.

Those are the vagaries of alliances for the ÒhyperpowerÓ, as the French say, even with a Japan which is assuming an ever increasing role in American strategy.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.

August 19, 2004

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