Thanks for Paul Midford for his extended response to my post on the US-Japan alliance. As has often been the case in the past, apparent strong disagreement winds up being close to agreement on many points once our views are fleshed out.

To pick up on just a few of his points:

1. I don't think you can dismiss the strengthening of the alliance to just "some areas related to technological innovation." Those areas, such as Missile Defense in fact, whether the Japanese public realizes it or not, in some ways may very well lock Japan into the alliance and in fact into "collective defense." The technological interlocking of US and Japanese systems in BMD may well make it impossible for Japan not to help defend the US against a missile attack (I believe Chris Hughes has argued this). Further, the recent "Operation Tomodachi" was much appreciated by the Japanese public and I think has wound up increasing support for the alliance. Finally, I certainly agree that what responses you get depends on what questions you ask and their phrasing. But there have been, as Paul knows, polls over the years that merely ask how close you feel toward other countries, and the % has never gone below 70% feeling close or very close to the U.S. but the responses toward China have been more negative than positive since the Tienanmin incident in 1989. I know that this doesn't reflect fear of a military attack by China, but I think for both the political elites and the public that fear for the future --always unspoken for fear of provoking China--is always in the background.

2. Koizumi's movements to regionalism I think are part of the consistent pattern of Japanese foreign policy in the last decade toward its "dual hedge," as Heginbotham and Samuels have called it, that is, of moving closer to Asia politically and economically to insure against becoming too dependent on the U.S. (its "satellite" in the terms we have discussed it here) but moving closer to the U.S. militarily to protect itself from the threat of China and the DPRK. Some refer to this as a "strategy," but I personally think that this is as much a reflection of Japan's place in international geo-politics and geo-economics as it is a strategy.
This is one reason that even with blips and relative differences, eventually all Japanese administrations come back to it. Note that the DPJ is reverting back to it after the deviation of the Futenma fiasco, and that even Hatoyama never said a word about moving away from the cooperation with the U.S. on BMD.

3. Speaking of Futenma, I think Paul and I would agree that the Okinawa bases are the soft "underbelly" of the US-Japan alliance: this is the issue that has the potential to undermine it more than any other (other than a conflict with China over Taiwan perhaps). I think we probably would also agree that the U.S. would be stupid (and may be even now) to think that Futenma was the end of this issue and now they could ignore it.
If the U.S. and Japan don't start finding ways to reduce the burden of the bases for the Okinawan people, there are going to be more Futenma-like issues for a long time ahead. And this must go beyond just implementing the Futenma move (which may actually never be implemented according to some). The DPJ manifesto on this and many other issues was not at all irrational; it was contradictory to other aspects of the manifesto (maintain the US-Japan alliance but move the bases out and have a nuclear-free NE Asia both of which would undermine the core of the alliance) and terribly implemented (Hatoyama had absolutely no leverage with the US on this issue whatsoever; it's a terribly incompetent politician who pushes an issue in a negotiation when he or she has no leverage with the other party!).

4. One thing that Paul neglects I think about "autonomous defense" is that there are some politicians in the LDP who have always wanted Japan to move that way and some suspect (include some Chinese
intellectuals) that the US-Japan alliance has moved from being a "cork in the bottle" containing
(fictional) resurgence of Japanese aggression and militarism to being an "eggshell," providing cover for the build-up of Japanese autonomous military power. I don't subscribe to this because, as noted above, in many ways the alliance has become more interdependent rather than less in recent years through things like BMD, even if Japan has acquired some autonomous capabilities like spy satellites when dissatisfied with the US in that area (Japan developed its own spy satellite when it felt it was not and would not get sufficient information about N. Korea missile launches from the U.S. spy satellites)

Best regards,
Ellis Krauss