J. Thomas Schieffer, US ambassador to Japan, is continuing with his campaign to convince the DPJ to change its opposition to the extension of the anti-terror special measures law, giving interviews to major dailies on the spat between the US and the DPJ. (Mainichi interview here; Asahi interview here.)The message is more or less the …
Tag: US-Japan alliance
Paradigm shift in the offing?
With political Japan in vacation mode, the decision by the DPJ leadership to oppose extension of the anti-terrorism special measures law continues to cast a shadow over the alliance. Defense Minister Koike's visit to Washington seems to have done little to ease American fears — her speech at CSIS, available online here, seems to contain …
Bigger than the alliance
As noted in this post, much of the discussion surrounding the DPJ leadership's decision to oppose the extension of the anti-terrorism special measures law before it expires in November has focused on the impact on the US-Japan alliance of Japan's effective departure from coalition activities in and around Afghanistan.The debate has hinged in part on …
The Upper House elections and Japanese security policy
Of all the factors that went into the LDP's historic loss on Sunday, it is safe to assume that the security policy pursued under the Koizumi and Abe cabinets — an emphasis on the alliance with the US that has seen the JSDF deployed to the Indian Ocean and Iraq, albeit in non-combat roles — …
Continue reading The Upper House elections and Japanese security policy
F-22 as a totem for China hawks
The F-22 issue continues to smolder, it seems, as Japan eyes the next-generation stealth fighter hungrily.The US Congress, however, has just passed the 2008 defense budget, which retains the Obey Amendment's prohibition on the export of the F-22.Will this be the end of Tokyo's lobbying to get the prohibition lifted in time for Japan to …
Missing the point on Japan’s normalization
Using the occasion of Japanese Air Self-Defense Force pilots participating in live-bombing exercises with the US in the Marianas, Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has a prominently featured article in today's edition (also on the front page, top of the fold of today's IHT) on Japan's shedding "military restraints."The NYT website also features …
Brave old world
Robert Kagan has come out with a new essay that is decidedly less revolutionary than his earlier "Of Power and Paradise," which captured the mood of the 2003 transatlantic feud.In this new essay in Policy Review, Kagan comes to a realization about the nature of American power and world order that others have been arguing …
A journey to the center of Mr. Abe
I mentioned earlier that I was in the process of reading Prime Minister Abe's Utsukushii Kuni e [Towards a beautiful country], the book he published in advance of last autumn's LDP presidential election and that was a popular seller after his inauguration as the Japanese people tried to figure out just who their new prime …
The white-hot rage of the ultra-nationalists
From the blog of Sakurai Yoshiko, newscaster and lady of the right, comes the text of her article in the 7 July issue of Shukan Daiyamondo concerning the comfort women resolution.Hers is another contribution to the fury of Japanese ultra-nationalists that is spilled across the pages of Japan's weeklies and monthlies as the congressional resolution …
Continue reading The white-hot rage of the ultra-nationalists
The time for choosing approaches
North Korea has indicated that in order for the six-party talks to go forward, the US will have to remove North Korea from its list of state supporters of terrorism. That demand, of course, is aimed squarely at US-Japan cooperation on the abductions issue, because Japan is adamant that so long as North Korea fails …
Tobias S. Harris 