Muddled Dawn. The Implications of the New Administration in Japan
Abstract
On 16 September 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide victory in national parliamentary elections. For the first time since its founding in 1996, the DPJ was asked to form a government, having displaced the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) as the governing party for only the second time since the LDP was formed in 1955 (the first time, in 1993, the LDP was out of power for only nine months). After the DPJ's victory, much ink was spilled proclaiming, or at least musing about, imminent, significant, even strategic changes to the U.S.-Japan relationship. Much of the controversy surrounded an agreement between the United States and Japan to remove Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma from its current location in the middle of a crowded urban area in the southern part of the island of Okinawa. In 2006, after years of negotiations, the United States and Japanese governments agreed to replace the MCAS with a new and smaller facility on Camp Schwab, another Marine Corps facility in the northern, less crowded part of Okinawa. Nine months after the DPJ's landslide, the party's first prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio, resigned, largely over a contretemps surrounding the Futenma issue. Japan ushered in its fifth prime minister in less than four years. Soon the ink was spilled again, this time declaring Japan ungovernable. Has there indeed been a new dawn for the Rising Sun? Should Americans be worried, as some pundits seem to be, about the alliance, or more recently, Japan's reliability? Probably the questions most Americans would ask are: Why should we care? Why do we still have troops in peaceful Japan more than 60 years after World War II? Why is Japan important, and why is it unique?
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2011
- Accession Number
- ADA535381
Entities
People
- David Hunter-chester
Organizations
- United States Army Combined Arms Center