US-Japan security overhaul gives Tokyo bigger role

TOKYO: A plan to tighten US-Japan military ties while streamlining American forces in Japan will embed Tokyo more firmly in Washington’s global strategy and set the stage for Japan to play a bigger role in the alliance.

Top US and Japanese defence officials and diplomats agreed earlier this month on a “road map” to transform the decades-old alliance, the pillar of Tokyo’s post-World War Two security.

“Simply put, this redefines Japan’s position within the US global military transformation,” said Yoshihide Soeya, a professor of international relations at Keio University in Tokyo.

“Japan will have its role within America’s global strategy.”

Part of a US effort to make its military more flexible globally, the troop realignment also fits snugly with Japan’s own efforts to shed the constraints of its post-war pacifist constitution and assume a higher global security profile.

Behind Japan’s ongoing shift in its security stance lies not only concern over China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes, but Tokyo’s desire to become a “normal nation” whose military can operate abroad and in conjunction with its allies.

“Two things are happening in parallel,” said Robert Karniol, the Bangkok-based Asia-Pacific editor of Japan’s Defence Weekly.

“The realignment is one, and the changes taking place in Japan’s security policy ... are the other,” Karniol said.

“The Japanese, in short, are going offshore. They have come to understand that the security of Japan and the defence of Japan isn’t limited to Japanese territory.”

Articulating that to a wary public, however, carries political risks, not least because of concern that the change boosts chances of Japan becoming embroiled in America’s battles.

“The United States takes the lead and Japan follows. That is the basic logic,” Keio University’s Soeya said.

“But they can’t make this explicit because it is politically risky and there are constitutional limits.”

Moves to revise Japan’s 1947 pacifist constitution, which bans the maintenance of a military but has been interpreted as allowing armed forces for self-defence, are gathering momentum, but few are willing to predict when the change will come.

Central to the US-Japan agreement is a plan to reorganise the 50,000 American troops in Japan, including a shift of 8,000 Marines by 2014 to the US territory of Guam from the southern Japan island of Okinawa, where their presence has long been resented.

That move depends on relocating the Marine’s Futenma air base from a crowded part of Okinawa to a rural area further north.

Reducing the US military “footprint” on Okinawa is vital for a healthy alliance, given the ever-present possibility that Okinawan anger will flare up, as it did after the 1995 rape of a Japanese schoolgirl by three US servicemen.

Tokyo has agreed to pay $6.09 billion of the $10.27 billion cost of new facilities and infrastructure in Guam and a US official has forecast that Japan faces another $20 billion in costs for the realignment, sparking domestic criticism that Japan is footing too much of the bill.

The planned relocation of Futenma, the Marines’ move to Guam and the hefty Japanese spending to fund it have grabbed most of the headlines in Japan, a reflection of Tokyo’s political imperative to reduce a burden Okinawans have long seen as unfair.

Equally significant, however, are a package of steps prescribed to improve US-Japan military cooperation in areas such as ballistic missile defence.

The plan calls for the US Army Japan’s headquarters at Camp Zama near Tokyo to be upgraded and a Japanese army Central Readiness Force headquarters moved to the base by March 2013.

A planned bilateral and joint operations coordination centre at the US Yokota Air Base in a Tokyo suburb will allow the allies to share missile defence responsibilities and coordinate joint operations.

“They’re laying the groundwork for Japan to play a broad role in security issues in the region and the world,” said Brad Glosserman, executive director for the Honolulu-based Pacific Forum CSIS think tank. “But it is all contingent on relaxing the domestic constraints that prevent Japan from doing that,” he added.

Japan has been stretching the boundaries of its constitution for the past decade and has sent troops to Iraq on their riskiest overseas mission since World War Two. Legal restrictions, though, have kept the soldiers to a non-combat, reconstruction role.

Some analysts — recalling that a 1996 agreement by a bilateral Special Action Committee on Okinawa (SACO) to relocate Futenma stalled for a decade in the face of local opposition — wonder whether the ambitious package will in fact be implemented.

“The question is the ability of the Japanese to deliver these changes,” Glosserman said. “There is no guarantee that we won’t find ourselves 10 years from now saying that it’s ‘SACO-2’.”—Reuters