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Japan's Hatoyama to meet U.S. envoy
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"Just to make it abundantly clear, both the United States and Japan, at the government-to-government level, have made it absolutely clear that these agreements have been signed, agreed to, and are going forward," new U.S. ambassador John Roos said in an interview with U.S. National Public Radio on Wednesday.
Roos was scheduled to meet Hatoyama later on Thursday.
Few analysts expected a Democratic Party government to make big changes in the alliance, given decades of close ties and Japan's reliance on the U.S. nuclear umbrella to protect it from such regional threats as unpredictable neighbor North Korea.
But Washington would do well to avoid a strident tone in talks with Japan's government-in-waiting, some analysts said.
"Japan is so heavily reliant on the United States that radical change is not going to happen," Sophia University's Nakano said.
"But American senior officials taking such a haughty stance after the Japanese people have spoken in favor of a change of government is not diplomatically very sound.
"They have to be careful. They don't want a backlash."
Such concerns may have been reflected in comments in Washington by the top U.S. diplomat for Asia, Kurt Campbell, who said Washington saw no contradiction between a call for more independence from Washington and a healthy alliance.
"For the alliance to maintain its relevance and its influence ... a degree of independence, of confidence, is absolutely essential on the part of Japan," Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told a think tank in Washington. "The United States supports that."
(Additional reporting by Yoko Nishikawa, and Matt Spetalnick and Paul Eckert in WASHINGTON)