Okinawa Upset

By TOBIAS HARRIS

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan alliance, but an election in the tiny city of Nago, Okinawa (population 59,742) may have unsettled the relationship. Nago is home to Camp Schwab, a Marine camp that is scheduled to be the site of a new American air base under the terms of a military realignment program agreed on by Japan and the United States in 2006. On Sunday, Nago elected a new mayor, Susumu Inamine, who opposes that plan. His victory has been interpreted as a victory for opponents of the 2006 agreement.

The biggest loser may have been the Hatoyama government, which campaigned last year on a promise to revisit the agreement but is now realizing the difficulty of finding an alternative. With Mr. Inamine's victory, the government will find it harder to retreat from its opposition to the 2006 roadmap, particularly given its sagging popularity and the corruption scandal surrounding Ichiro Ozawa, secretary general of the Democratic Party of Japan.

By the same token, Washington also lost Sunday. Some analysts have cautioned the Obama administration not to push the Hatoyama government too hard on Futenma, arguing that doing so could cause considerable harm to the alliance even if the U.S. were to get its way on the realignment of U.S. forces. With the election of Mr. Inamine the risks from pressuring the Hatoyama government have grown, not only because Washington will appear to be strong-arming a democratically chosen national government, but also because it would be pressuring that government to ignore a vote in a municipality directly affected by realignment.

Mr. Hatoyama has said that his government will make a decision on the 2006 agreement in May. In the meantime, the Obama administration must give serious thought to whether the 2006 agreement is worth poisoning the U.S.-Japan relationship. As it stands, Washington will either have to enlist the Hatoyama government as an ally in imposing the agreement on Nago—which seems like an unlikely partnership—or it will have to pressure both the Hatoyama government and the people of Nago to accept an agreement that neither desire.

The U.S. must bear considerable blame for insisting so strongly on an agreement that no Japanese government could sell to the Okinawan people for environmental, moral and historical reasons. While Washington would prefer to debate Futenma simply on the basis of strategic considerations, the reality is that for the people most affected by the 2006 roadmap, realignment is anything but a strategic question. The Okinawan people have been asked for too long to bear too great a burden—which includes the social and environmental costs of hosting more than half the U.S. forces in Japan—for them to accept the roadmap quietly, whatever its merits.

The election, moreover, is another reminder of the tension between the U.S.-Japan alliance and the development of Japanese democracy—or indeed democracy in any longtime U.S. ally, as the U.S. found when South Korea transitioned from one-party rule. The DPJ's victory in August, as the first unambiguous power transition from one ruling party to another in the postwar period, marked the first opportunity for the Japanese public to reconsider Japan's alliance with the U.S. While the DPJ is not opposed to the alliance—both the prime minister and Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada have stated their support repeatedly—the DPJ is opposed to how the alliance was handled by the Liberal Democratic Party. The DPJ alleges that the LDP ran the alliance behind closed doors and put the interests of the U.S. before those of the Japanese people, amounting to an unequal partnership between the two countries. Both the secret agreements on nuclear weapons under investigation by the Japanese foreign ministry and the 2006 roadmap are part of the DPJ's case against the U.S.-LDP alliance. And the vote in Nago is the latest sign that Japanese voters—at least in a city where the alliance is a local issue—buy the DPJ's argument that the relationship needs to be changed, at least as it pertains to them.

There is a silver lining here. Insofar as the Nago election makes the rejection of the 2006 roadmap more likely, this presents an opportunity for both Washington and Tokyo to step back and reconsider how the alliance should function and how it should be sold to the Japanese people in Japan's new democracy. The age when the alliance could be managed by bureaucrats and experts from both countries has passed.

The discussion now needs to include more voices from across Japan's political spectrum, from local governments as well as the elite ministries. It should be a two-way discussion, of course: the localities must learn to think in terms of national interests even as the U.S. government has learned to be more sensitive to local concerns. But the U.S. government needs to think harder about how to build support for the alliance, and not only in communities asked to host American forces. It must be able to explain plainly to Japanese citizens why they are there in the first place.

Ultimately the U.S. needs to worry less about the 2006 agreement, and more about building a sustainable foundation for the U.S.-Japan alliance by moving beyond the one-party regime that had been so amenable to U.S. interests for so long.

Mr. Harris, a former aide to a DPJ lawmaker, is a doctoral student in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.