Fresh in today’s New York Times is a report on President Obama’s arrival in Tokyo, where it would seem he has his work cut out for him in “an effort to resuscitate flagging relations with Japan, once America’s most important ally in the region.” This is a bit of an overstatement, at least for the time being. The continuation of the military alliance means Japan remains America’s closest regional ally by default, regardless of the tone set by its new DPJ government and renewed populist tensions over the US base in Okinawa. But when Obama and Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama sit down to discuss an agenda spokesman Robert Gibbs says involves “the international economy, climate change, as well as North Korea and nonproliferation,” China will still be the unspoken topic at the top of both men’s minds.
Within a year, China’s economy is projected to overtake Japan’s to become the world’s second largest, continuing to grow and develop with all the commercial and technological trappings modernization brings. China already holds the cards with the US on all the issues Gibbs mentioned and engages itself in global politics with a national assertiveness that Japan lacks after two decades of economic stagnation and a looming demographic crisis. Not-so-slowly but surely, it would seem as though East Asia is slipping back into its age old pre-industrial status quo, with the “Middle Kingdom” at the center and its much smaller neighbors on the periphery. This makes the Japanese anxious and more than a little unsure of their place in the world—anxious enough to bring about nothing less than a peaceful revolution with the electoral ouster of the long dominant Liberal Democratic Party, and unsure enough for new PM Hatoyama to opine in the New York Times about balancing between the US-Japan security pact as a “cornerstone of Japanese diplomatic policy” and recognizing East Asia as Japan’s “basic sphere of being” since “the era of US unilateralism may come to an end.”
