Politically, Japanese stupendous $900 billion currency reserves hide behind the larger and intractable problem of the $1.3 trillion Beijing holds, mostly in dollars, rising at a more and more rapid rate. Furthermore Beijing’s is a problem showing no signs of abating with China’s export subsidies and stonewalling reevaluation of its undervalued currency. Tokyo announced on the eve of Abe’s visit the Bank of Japan was considering how to turn part of its reserves into investments. It’s something Beijing had already announced with great fanfare. But with a massively corrupt, indebted, shaky financial structure, that’s a stretch. The new Japanese megabanks, on the other hand, have cleaned off their post-Bubble balance sheets, are now a crouching tiger ready to give Wall St and The City a run for their money.

Pushing the whole economic liberalization, reducing Japan’s massive public debt, using administrative reform to tidy up Koizumi’s breakthroughs, are still ahead for Abe. But unlike Bush, his opposition – a potpourri of has been renegade conservative politicians from the ruling Liberal Democrats mixed incongruously with the dregs of Japan’s anemic socialist tradition – haven’t an alternative program they could implement even if they were to achieve more than a harassing increase with an anti-vote. However reluctantly, a once pacifist postwar Japanese public does not question the American alliance.

One can’t help casting an eye to the other side of the world, to America’s other Special Relationship. Bush’s blood brother in combat, Tony Blair, limps off into history, not only with a still failing Iraq but with his Labor Party’s “devolution” careening toward a breakup of the 1707 English-Scottish Union. Labor’s opposition, Conservative David Cameron, sounds more and more like a pale imitation of the effete Edward Heath -- with no Maggie Thatcher in sight. British TV burlesques the Iranian taking of the British hostages – a far piece from 1940 and the strains of Land of Hope and Glory! Nor is it just mood which bedevils the U.S. Number one ally: the latest British military budget, the only one in European NATO that counts for much, proposes to sacrifice Her Majesty’s Navy as a worldwide effective fighting force.

Abe’s Japan, therefore, however reluctantly, is having to the exercise of power thrust on it, moving into an unacknowledged place as America’s No. 1 ally. China will try to continue to block it from a seat in the Security Council, that rat’s nest of political skullduggery which has defied a misrepresentation solution for at least 35 years. But Japan’s revised constitution which Abe has set into motion, finally will permit Tokyo to match its yen as the UN’s No. 2 contributor with participation in peacekeeping and, hopefully, with more honest additions to the UN’s corrupt bureaucracy in New York. [Stretching, Koizumi had sent noncombatant troops to Iraq with a $5 billion reconstruction package.]

Despite the bitter press campaigns – largely initiated in Mainland China and South Korea – to recall Japan’s horrendous World War II atrocities and the participation of the kin of many of Japan’s leading contemporary politicians, the Japanese are taking their place. The American alliance has become a mutual affair – with the Japanese making important technical contributions to space age electronics as well as deployment of naval forces.

Nowhere has necessity been more the mother of invention: North Korea’s unannounced 1997 missile test over Japan and the accelerating Chinese military buildup with its aggressive cultivation of the world’s miscreants, from Venezuela to Burma to Sudan, has forced the pace of Japanese rearmament and integration with American Pacific security strategy. The Okinawa flashpoint in troop relations has been somewhat defused with the double-edged contribution of a Guam buildup despite the Iraqi strain on U.S. forces. And the old petty quarrels over turf in northeast Asian surveillance have gone by the boards with Washington needing whatever Japan can contribute in watching Chinese [rather than Soviet] subs and infiltration.

The Japanese still don’t speak that much English. The Tale of Genji isn’t ever going to replace Hamlet any time soon in American classrooms. But the Abe-Bush’s very low key meeting was more evidence the Japan-U.S. alliance is a layer cake and the icing is getting sweeter if not all that much thicker.