UCSD Professor Urges Revision of U.S.-Japan Security Treaty : Foreign policy: Chalmers Johnson calls the agreement an anachronism and warns of the Asian nation’s increasing military budget.

UC San Diego Professor Chalmers Johnson said Wednesday that rewriting the U. S.-Japan Security Treaty was “the only way to prevent genuine Japanese rearmament.”

In a speech at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, Johnson called the treaty and its provisions establishing an “American protectorate over Japan” an anachronism rooted in conditions of the 1950s that no longer exist.

Johnson, author of the book, “MITI and the Japanese Miracle,” and other works on both China and Japan, said Japan is the only major country in the world still carrying out large increases in its defense budget. The unstated stimulus, he said, is a conviction that a dwindling U. S. security role will force Japan in the 1990s “to provide more toward its security than it does now.”

The widely quoted expert on Japan’s industrial policies condemned the current U. S.-Japan Security Treaty, under which 63,000 U. S. troops are based here, as “a cynical, conservative” Japanese response to American post-World War II occupation policy.

In accepting a unilateral American obligation to defend Japan with no obligation for reciprocity, “the Japanese do not feel they are taking a free ride on the backs of the American public. They feel they are responding to conditions that were created by the conqueror,” Johnson said.

In return, “what Japan provides the United States is something we are no longer sure we really need--namely, bases,” he added. “This relationship has become anachronistic and even poisonous in many ways.”

Rewriting the terms of the alliance, Johnson said, “is the only way to prevent genuine Japanese rearmament--to make the agreement more equitable and spell out in some objective and mutually beneficial way what each party would contribute to it.”

Without a genuine alliance between the United States and Japan, he said, Japanese armed forces could eventually replace American troops in Asia.

“A refusal to make the necessary changes in a planned way will only force their implementation later in the context of an economic crisis,” he said.

Johnson’s advocacy of revision of the security treaty has not found any supporters within either the American or Japanese governments. But a handful of scholars on both sides of the Pacific have begun to talk about revising, or even scrapping, the pact.

Other scholars, and even some officials in both governments, have urged retention of the treaty to enable the United States to restrain Japan from transforming itself into a major military power.

Johnson said the United States should put economic objectives first in its policy toward Japan and downgrade security ties “to a supportive and secondary role.”

Washington, he added, should “force (Japan) to play a role more like that of a more normal nation-state” by pressuring it to give aid untied to exports, bear more costs of maintaining U. S. troops here, participate in international peacekeeping efforts, open its markets to newly industrializing nations and accept more refugees.”

Japan should carry out these tasks “not as a way of replacing America but in collaboration with America,” he said.