U.S. Nudges Japan to Take Bigger Role in Own Security

The United States and Japan, once bitter battlefield foes now turned major military partners, are bringing new demands to a security alliance regarded as the linchpin of Asia’s peace and prosperity.

When President Clinton and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto meet this week, they will hail new accords that commit Japan to provide more support services for U.S. troops and that compel the United States to reduce its presence in Okinawa.

It’s all part of an effort to reaffirm ties and nudge the lopsided alliance between victor and vanquished into a more equitable relationship reflecting Japan’s dramatically changed fortunes and the new realities of the post-Cold War world.

“The relationship is based on outdated premises rooted in the past World War II experience of patron and client, which is extremely and inherently unequal. That is no longer a viable means to sustain the alliance,” said Joseph Cronin, a senior research professor at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington. “There needs to be serious mutuality and not just rhetoric.”

Few people question the 1951 bilateral security pact itself, under which Japan offers bases and more than $5 billion annually to provide America’s military launch pad in Asia in return for a U.S. commitment to defend Japan.

The pact reassures Asia, still wary of a resurgence of Japanese militarism, as much as it benefits the two nations: Japan’s financial support, for instance, is the most generous among all U.S. allies and makes it cheaper to house the 47,000 troops and military facilities here than in the United States.

But since the Soviet Union collapsed, removing Asia’s most menacing enemy, most agree that the status quo is no longer suitable. The task of reviewing the alliance has taken on greater urgency: Recent tensions in North Korea and the Taiwan Strait underscored the need for closer cooperation, and the rape of an Okinawan schoolgirl involving U.S. servicemen highlighted the long-simmering local resentment toward the U.S. presence.

Some analysts, fearing that young Turks within the Japanese military have begun doubting America’s long-term commitment to the region and are casting restless eyes at other partners, want Clinton and Hashimoto to use the summit to reaffirm security ties. Others call for a wholesale review of why the alliance is still necessary, the best way to deploy U.S. troops here and how Japan can more actively support them.

In recent years, the United States has nudged Japan to provide more support services, more payments for stationing troops here and more technology transfers.

“Now America is asking for more and more reciprocity,” said Makoto Momoi, a former Defense Agency official specializing in security issues for the Yomiuri Research Institute. “In the past, America supplied Japan with advanced technology, hardware and software, and it’s time for Japan to return the favor.”

Japan is responding--in its quintessential way of one incremental step at a time.

Since the Persian Gulf War, Japan has begun breaking long-standing security taboos, from its landmark 1992 law to dispatch noncombat troops abroad for peacekeeping missions to the soon-to-be announced cross-servicing agreement.

That agreement will allow Japan to provide such services as refueling and transport to U.S. troops during joint training--and to supply weapons parts in only the second exception to its decades-long export ban on them. Although the accord is strictly applicable in peacetime only, during joint training or U.N. peacekeeping operations, defense analysts believe it will lay the groundwork for Japan’s greater cooperation during an actual emergency.

In recent months, the nation has begun to broach the highly sensitive question of whether to engage in collective self-defense--a position that would open the way for Japan to participate in actual combat operations with the United States in the event of, say, a Korean crisis. To do so, Japan would need to revise or reinterpret its pacifist constitution, a position advocated by the opposition New Frontier Party and some members of the leading Liberal Democratic Party.

Last year, Japan increased to 70% its share of the costs of U.S. troops here. And it signed a technology exchange agreement in 1994 giving the Pentagon potential access to Japan’s long-coveted technology in flat-panel displays, new materials and other fields--although Japanese corporations have shown little interest so far.

The Liberal Democrats are studying a nine-point proposal to strengthen Japanese security cooperation, including allowing Americans to use commercial airports during emergencies.

During the Gulf War, the United States asked then-Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu to provide a Japanese commercial airliner to transport troops. Kaifu couldn’t decide, so he asked the transport minister, who couldn’t decide and asked the airlines’ presidents, who couldn’t decide and asked the labor unions, who refused, said Masashi Nishihara of the National Defense Academy in Yokosuka.

Officials also have begun to discuss the need for emergency legislation that would strengthen the prime minister’s powers in times of crisis. The proposition is still highly sensitive, because Japan remains haunted by the ghosts of past militarism. But last year’s earthquake in Kobe and subway gas attack in Tokyo and recent Asian tensions are slowly bringing the topic to the fore, analysts say.

Such steps may seem small and slow to Americans, and many predict that it will take another crisis to push Japan into decisive action. But they disturb Asian neighbors such as China, whose foreign minister last year gave Pentagon officials a “20-minute diatribe about 500 years of Japanese aggression,” the Institute for National Strategic Studies’ Cronin said.

Nishihara, however, said the Gulf War, in which Japan was furiously criticized for not contributing enough, prompted soul-searching among many mortified Japanese about ways to play a larger role.

Pressures increased during the height of North Korea’s nuclear brinkmanship two years ago, when Japan told the United States it could not send minesweepers into the region, and during the recent tensions between China and Taiwan.

Japan’s inability to fight side by side with Americans is “shameful,” one Japanese defense official said. “People always ask me what I do in the navy--fish?”

But Nishihara sees a more ominous outcome unless Japan further expands its role to aid U.S. operations, such as minesweeping in open seas or developing satellite surveillance capabilities. He, like most here, opposes acquiring aircraft carriers, long-range bombers or other equipment that would give Japan offensive capabilities.

Japan’s $44-billion defense budget is one of the world’s largest, but the figure is inflated by labor costs that are twice as high as America’s. Although the Self-Defense Forces boast some stellar high-tech equipment, they lack the ability to project power and they specialize in such defensive capabilities as anti-submarine warfare.

“Another Korean conflict will really test this alliance,” Nishihara said. “If American boys are getting killed in Korea and Japan can’t do anything, that may be the end of the alliance.”

But others argue that the Americans themselves are imperiling the alliance by moving too slowly to reduce their controversial presence in Okinawa. The base issue exploded last year after the Okinawa rape incident cast the national spotlight on decades of local grievances against the military.

On Friday, Hashimoto and U.S. Ambassador Walter F. Mondale unveiled plans to return within seven years the U.S. military’s most controversial facility, the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, in the congested town of Ginowan.

On Monday, Defense Secretary William J. Perry is expected to formally announce the entire package of Okinawa measures, which Japanese news reports say will represent the largest return of Okinawan land since the island’s reversion to Japan in 1972. The United States had controlled the island in accordance with the 1951 treaty.

But it remains uncertain whether the accords will satisfy Okinawans, who bear the burden of hosting nearly half of the U.S. troops in Japan. After the Futenma return was announced, some Okinawans said they will not be content until they are freed of the entire U.S. presence.

Some observers have called for the Marines to be relocated from Japan. “So many bases remind us that the occupation is not over,” Momoi said.

U.S. scholar Chalmers Johnson warns that the continued presence of Marines in Okinawa is a “ticking time bomb” that could explode and force the Americans out of Japan.

The Clinton-Hashimoto summit won’t come close to resolving all security issues, just as it is unlikely to settle all trade problems. But it will represent another small step forward in the process of adapting the critical alliance to the changing realities of the day, officials say.

“The thing that seemed to present a cloud over the security relationship was a nagging feeling that this thing was based on Cold War rationales,” Mondale said. “We will be reaffirming the relationship in a post-Cold War era, and it will have a texture and depth that show both sides don’t just say it, they mean it.”

Megumi Shimizu and Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.