By Yukio Hatoyama who resigned yesterday-one year after winning election by a huge electoral majority.
The S.O. has been grabbing every chance to watch the news coverage. It is kind of nice to see it in the original so to speak-not so filtered by American perceptions and biases. However in the end the reason for his resignation comes down to one particular issue:
He failed to get the US to budge on Futenma and in the long run failed to get the US to abandon the bad deal it and Japan signed back in 2005.
In fact-Hatoyama folded like a cheap suit-by coming out about six weeks ago and announcing publically that he would no longer seek to move the forces at Futenma off of Okinawa. It has been a down hill slide since then-culminating in a 17% approval rating the day we arrived in Japan.
It is kind of sad really. Re-framing the 2005 DPRI agreement was in the interest of both countries, although the US has behaved stupidly-insisting that Japan live up to this bad deal. Nor does Hatoyama’s resignation really change the direction that DPJ is going to take, which is to push the US on making concessions about Futenma in particular and US basing in general. The up and coming leadership will demand a reduced US presence-knowing full well they won’t get it, which they believe will soften up the ground for what they really want-more strings attached to the billions yen the Japanese pay for the US presence here.
And that was actually a strong hand for Hatoyama-had he known how to play it. The US needs its bases here for extending its foreign policy reach, more than Japan needs them for its defense. Most of the threats to Japan today are economic, not military with the sole exception of Chinese and North Korean missiles. The US is in great reliance on the money Japan spends on the bases and the MLC employees, which mask the real cost of the bases from US defense accounting. Reducing that funding would have produced a real row with Washington-but would have been a good hammer to drive home the point that Futenma can be closed and the right assets moved elsewhere. The key factor, however, would have been having the US abandon the incredibly stupid decision to move CVW-5 to Iwakuni in 2013.
Now it appears as if the DPJ will simply redouble its efforts-but it will be from a much weaker position since DPJ is sure to take a drubbing in the Upper House elections in July. And the US knows that and will simply stall for time.
But that still does not make the 2005 agreement any less of a bad deal and the timetable for the moves will continue.
This ought to be fun to watch.