Japan Chair Platform: Green Shoots in the U.S.-Japan Alliance

What a difference a year makes. Last fall at this time, the Obama administration was scrambling to make sense of the Hatoyama government’s half-baked promise to counterbalance the United States in Asia and his vacillating pledges to both the American president and Okinawan anti-base activists to “trust” him on Futenma. Five months into the job as Hatoyama’s replacement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan is already as bruised and battered as the four short-termers who preceded him, but there is finally a sense that pragmatism has prevailed in the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). In fact, managers of the U.S.-Japan security relationship are finding themselves able to explore policy initiatives under the DPJ that might have been difficult even to table in the final beleaguered years of Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) governments. Prime Minister Kan faces bumpy political and economic terrain ahead, but there is positive momentum in the security discourse in Japan that President Obama should encourage when he goes to Yokohama this week.