In Japan but surrounded by U.S. influence, Okinawa struggles with split identity

In Okinawa, once an independent kingdom, pay is low, jobs are few and many are angry about a liberation that's turned into an endless American military occupation. For Okinawans in America, many feel a desire to stay tied to their roots.

By Chico Harlan
Thursday, July 1, 2010; A01

CHATAN, JAPAN -- These days, when Melissa Tomlinson describes her fraught relationship with the United States, she speaks in English, the language she once rejected.

She grew up here on the island of Okinawa. Her mother was Japanese, and her father was an American who served in the U.S. Army, came to Okinawa, fell in love, fell out of love, then fell out of touch.

"I had plans to track him down, find him and punch him in the face," said Tomlinson, 22. "I just wanted to figure out my identity."

Tomlinson's family tensions illustrate the complex cultural clashes that dominate the politics of Okinawa and, lately, relations between what have been the world's two largest economies as they cope with a rising China and a belligerent North Korea.

For the more than 60 years since the end of World War II, native Okinawans and U.S. troops stationed on nearby bases have developed deep, passionate and generation-spanning ties that complicate political and diplomatic debates about the future of the U.S. military here.

Those passions have recently claimed the head of one Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who had called for the Americans to be booted off Okinawa, and caused his successor to sharply tone down his party's assertive stance toward the United States.

A vocal majority of Okinawans still demand closing the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. American officials, citing proximity to North Korea, China and Southeast Asia, insist it remain in Okinawa. Japan, in its attempt to mediate, has only frustrated both sides.

The current resolution, which Prime Minister Naoto Kan says his government will honor, calls for Futenma's eventual relocation to a less populated region in the north of the island. Kan apologized last week for the "heavy burden" facing Okinawans.

Many locals on this Pacific island hosting more than half of the 47,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan complain most commonly about the noise, congestion and crime. But emotional blood ties and cultural confusion amplify those concerns. Tormented by her identity, Tomlinson said she has tried to kill herself "a couple times" in the past two years.

Tomlinson said she struggles to convince herself -- and others -- that she is truly Japanese and Okinawan. She called her identity "ambiguous" and said her feeling of being an incomplete person has sometimes led to deep depression.

A generation of biracial Okinawans know about intercultural relationships, writ small. They know about romance and separations, child-support battles and reunions. They know that Japanese children refer to their biracial peers as "halfs," and nowadays, they know of the local American-Asian school, for biracial children, where those kids are taught to call themselves "doubles."

Okinawa's demographics separate it from mainland Japan. Here, the rates of single-parent households and divorce are twice the national average. At the American-Asian school, 70 percent of the 80 students come from single-parent households, Principal Midori Thayer said.

"Unfortunately, some kids never live with their father, but they cannot lose their DNA," she said. "Their body shows that they are not 100 percent Japanese."

Denny Tamaki, 50, the local representative to the Japanese parliament, knows only that his father, an American serviceman whom he has never met, was named William.

When William returned to the States and Tamaki's mother decided not to follow, she burned his photos and letters. When they moved to a new home, she didn't give him their new address. When Tamaki turned 10, his mother took him to a government office, where they officially changed his first name to Yasuhiro.

Tamaki knows little English and wants Futenma moved off Okinawa because "it feels like we're living under occupation." But he has a passion for American music -- Aerosmith, for instance -- and American television shows.

A decade ago he tried to track down his father, with no luck. When his kids ask about their grandfather, he tells them that it would take the detectives from "CSI: Miami" to find him.

Search for a father

Tomlinson's mother and father were married on Okinawa, and then moved together to Georgia after his tour on the island ended in 1975. Tomlinson was born in Hinesville, Ga., while her father was stationed at Fort Stewart.

Tomlinson's parents separated when she was 3; she returned to Okinawa in 1990 with her mother. Her father retained custody of their two older children, who stayed in the United States with him.

Growing up, Tomlinson said, she remembered nothing about the separation, and never spoke to her father or siblings. "I've had to live with some tough decisions," said Melissa's father, who requested that his name not be used.

Tomlinson said her conflicted feelings were often fueled by her mother, who told her she looked "like an American" and tried to hide her from her co-workers. She said they fought frequently, and she told her mother: "Why did you have me? I want to be a Japanese, but I don't get to choose."

In school, her dual identities battled. Sometimes she was an American who didn't speak proper English. Sometimes she was a Japanese who didn't look Japanese. For several years, she tried to forget every English word she knew.

During high school, she said, a teacher encouraged her to learn English because she would need it if one day she wanted to track down her father. "Maybe you can hear the truth," the teacher told her. "You should know both sides."

At the University of the Ryukyus, Tomlinson tried to find English-speaking friends. She watched American television without the subtitles. Still, she confided to friends that she felt depressed.

From her mother, Tomlinson had heard only nasty tales about her father, who was once stationed at the Army's Torii base. After her junior year in college, in spring 2009, she decided to try to find him and left school for a time.

In March, her U.S. military ID card, a privilege from a relationship she never had, was expiring. The Army passed along her father's address. She e-mailed him, asking for him to sign the required forms for a new ID.

Weeks later, she heard back from the father who had not seen her since she was 3.

"Hi Melissa, Hearing from you, to say the least, came as quite a shock," he wrote. "I was not aware that you could speak English let alone read or write it. The last time we had contact, and I am sure you do not remember it, you could only speak Japanese. Trying to bridge the gap with words after all this time would be futile. In life sometimes we have to make decisions that we don't know if they are right or not, but we have to live with them."

Tomlinson read and reread the e-mail. She discussed it with friends, and together they parsed the words. Their relationship continued, e-mail by e-mail, and she learned that he liked fishing, and that he missed Okinawa, and that he says he has thought about her every day.

For all these years, he wrote, he avoided contact because he didn't want her to be torn between parents.

"It would have made your life miserable," he wrote.

Softbank to Help Twitter Get Even Bigger in Japan

Image by Robert Sanzalone via Flickr

By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — Twitter is set to get a big boost in Japan, one of its biggest and fastest-growing markets, after the Japanese cellphone carrier Softbank on Tuesday announced new handsets designed to link to the microblogging site, part of a major effort by Softbank to get a piece of America’s tech savvy.

Twitter has taken off in a big way here in the past two years, fanned by media exposure and the use of the service by a flurry of celebrities: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama tweets frequently, as does the astronaut and national hero Soichi Noguchi, who tweets from the International Space Station.

The number of unique users in Japan surged from 521,000 in April 2009 to 7.52 million in March, a 15-fold increase, according to the technology ratings service Nielsen Online Japan. Figures show Twitter is fast catching up to Japan’s biggest social networking site, Mixi, which had about 10.8 million unique users in March. An analysis by Semiocast, based in Paris, in February found 14 percent of the millions of tweets per day worldwide are in Japanese.

Image by digitalbear via Flickr

Twitter’s reach in Japan — the percentage of Internet users who have used the service — is about 12.3 percent, higher than the service’s reach of 10.2 percent in the United States, according to Nielsen. The service trumps Facebook, another American social networking site that has made a foray into Japan, which only has about 1.4 million users in the country, or less than 1 percent of its global membership.

“Twitter has seen tremendous growth all around the world in the past year, but in particular we’ve seen outstanding growth in Japan,” Evan Williams, chief executive of Twitter, said via a live link from the company’s headquarters in San Francisco at a Softbank news conference here. “It’s become one of our biggest and most important countries.”

“We believe Twitter is poised for even greater growth given the tremendous usage of keitai in Japan, and because Twitter has always been focused on the mobile, cellphone experience,” Mr. Williams added, using the Japanese word for cellphone.

Softbank, Japan’s fastest-growing cellphone carrier, with about 22 million subscribers, has been pushing Twitter as a new way to get Japanese hooked on its mobile data services. Softbank, which is the sole carrier of the iPhone in Japan, also runs the country’s most popular search engine and biggest Internet provider, and recently won exclusive rights to bring the iPad to Japan.

Softbank’s founder and chief executive, Masayoshi Son, has been one of Twitter’s biggest fans, tweeting enthusiastically, posting frequent replies to questions from followers and urging all of Softbank’s employees to tweet. He uses Twitter even from his bathtub, he claimed, using an iPhone and a Ziploc bag.

“Twitter has changed my life, my lifestyle,” he said. Japan is in fact leapfrogging older sites like Facebook to register directly to Twitter. “That’s why it’s experiencing explosive growth here in Japan,” Mr. Son said.

The service has benefited from a certain kind of herd mentality in Japan.

“Whenever Twitter celebrities are introduced on TV, tens of thousands of Japanese start to use it,” said Nobuyuki Hayashi, a Japan-based technology expert and author of three books on Twitter. In cities like Tokyo, where many people live alone and inviting friends over is rare, a lot of people may have been craving conversation partners they are now finding on Twitter, he said.

Another big factor is the compact nature of the Japanese script means 140 characters allows for more substantial and complex posts. The word “internationalization,” for example, takes up just 3 characters in Japanese.

But there are plenty of more mundane tweets, often reflecting the nation's love of cuisine. “Midnight ramen now,” read a recent post by the user @ico390, followed by a link to a picture of noodles snapped on a cellphone.

Softbank also has a 30 percent stake in the Silicon Valley video streaming site Ustream, a service Mr. Son said he hoped would encourage users to tweet links to videos as well as photos.

Usage is especially high among Japanese in their 20s and 30s, is concentrated in big cities and about 44 percent of all users have tweeted from their cellphones, according to a 2010 survey of 5,500 Japanese by the Tokyo-based Fujitsu Research Institute.

Computer users connect to Twitter for an average of 4.4 hours a day, while those who use handsets log in for 2.3 hours, according to a separate study of 10,500 users by Ascii Media Works.

Softbank’s Twitter widget, or embedded application, will display an icon on the welcome screen of 14 cellphones from Softbank that lets users jump directly to a customized Twitter site, according to Softbank. Many phones also come with touch panels, TV receivers, solar cells and waterproofing.

“We expect to start growing faster than ever here with increased awareness of Twitter,” said Kevin Thau, Twitter’s mobile platform director, visiting Japan for Softbank’s announcement. “People tend to explore when they get new phones. It’s great for discoverability,” he said. The official Twitter widget on Softbank, he said, is hopefully “the start of a trend around the world.”

The growth in Japan adds to the good news at Twitter, which said last month that it had 106 million registered users and was adding new users at the rate of 300,000 a day.

Twitter’s service in Japan has long led the way in a quest by the company to take advantage of its rapid growth for revenue. Since Twitter’s Japan site went online in April 2008, it has carried ads — something the U.S site did not have. Companies from Sony to Toyota have set up corporate Twitter accounts.

Last month, Twitter finally unveiled an advertising program in the United States that shows up when users search for keywords that advertisers have bought to link to their ads.

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Novel Idea for Japan - Airport for Budget Travel

By HIROKO TABUCHI

MITO, JAPAN — The diktat from the governor was the kind of sweeping order that gives Japanese bureaucrats heart attacks: plans for a three-story airport terminal, painstakingly laid over years, were to be scrapped and replaced with a single-floor layout.

The New York Times

Trimmings would be pared to a minimum. Boarding bridges would be eliminated, with passengers told to board planes from the tarmac and even handle their own check-in luggage — an idea so blasphemous in service-conscious Japan that one local official said his “mind went blank” when he heard of the plan.

Ibaraki Airport, which opens Thursday about 85 kilometers, or 53 miles, north of Tokyo, is intended to be a completely new type of Japanese airport: a no-frills facility that could finally open up Japan’s expensive capital city to low-budget airlines.

Ignored by Japan’s big-league carriers, the little airport is up against all odds. It is the 98th airport in a country with a landmass smaller than California’s. Ibaraki Prefecture is devoid of tourist attractions, except for an ancient garden, known for its plum blossoms, and famous purveyors of natto, or pungent, fermented soy beans.

For now, Ibaraki will offer just two flights a day: one to Seoul by the South Korean carrier Asiana Airlines, and another to Kobe, a medium-size port city in western Japan, by the Japanese budget carrier SkyMark Airlines.

Even Japan’s transportation minister, Seiji Maehara, has been hard-pressed to muster much enthusiasm for the airport’s opening, despite its roughly ¥22 billion, or $243 million, in funding from local and national coffers. The news media have painted Ibaraki as just another money-losing airport, an example of the useless public works projects that dot Japan’s countryside.

“I’m not about to beg airlines from Japan and elsewhere to fly to Ibaraki,” Mr. Maehara said last week. “The prefecture needs to do what it can to make use of the airport.”

A closer look at Ibaraki, however, reveals a strategy that could jolt Japan’s long-stagnant aviation sector. Some experts say Ibaraki — with its explicit focus on cutting costs and budget carriers — could be just the kind of airport the country needs at a time when traffic demand is slumping, consumers are scrimping after a recession and airlines are being pressed to cut costs to the bone.

Some experts say low-cost air services have the best potential for growth, especially as incomes rise in big countries like China and India, bringing air travel to more people. Budget carriers have sprung up across the region, but Japan’s airline industry, dominated by giants Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airlines — and plagued by expensive and inefficient airports — has been largely left behind.

Experts say the greater Tokyo area, especially, could use another airport to handle flights by low-cost carriers, much like the Stansted or Luton airports outside London. The capital and its environs, the largest metropolitan sprawl in the world with a population of 40 million, are served by two airports, Narita — which handles most of the international traffic — and Haneda.

But capacity is notoriously tight, and that is expected to continue even after expansions at both airports in the next year. Strict regulations have stifled the flexible allocation of flights. Moreover, high landing and other costs put Narita and Haneda beyond the reach of low-cost carriers.

“Ibaraki is definitely on the right track,” said Ushio Chujo, a professor of transportation economics at Keio University in Tokyo.

“The airport’s success would hinge on whether more low-cost carriers will start up in Japan and in neighboring countries,” he said. “That could take 5 to 10 years, so Ibaraki will have to prepare for the long haul.”

In 2007, long after blueprints for an impressive terminal building at Ibaraki Airport were drawn up, and contractors hired, Ibaraki Prefecture’s governor, Masaru Hashimoto, called for building “an airport Japan had never seen before.”

“Just another standard airport wasn’t going to work. We’d be behind the times as soon as we opened,” Mr. Hashimoto said in an interview. “We needed to turn our thinking upside down.”

Mr. Hashimoto ordered a redesign of the terminal from scratch, brainstorming ways to cut operating costs, both for the airport and for carriers. He scrapped a plan to place arrivals, departures and a viewing deck on separate floors, instead putting everything on one level. That meant passengers could be served with fewer staff members.

Mr. Hashimoto got rid of boarding bridges, which are expensive for carriers to use, and for airports to maintain. Passengers instead will board from the tarmac. (“People will love it — they can pose for photos in front of the plane,” he said.)

He also wants passengers to carry their own check-in luggage to the plane, in a setup similar to some regional American airports — though he is still negotiating with officials on the point. (“We think that’s a bit too much,” one provincial official said on condition of anonymity, saying he was unauthorized to speak to the media.)

Planes landing at Ibaraki will taxi and park in a way that does not require the help of a tractor to push them back onto the runway before taking off — another reason passengers will board from the tarmac. That move, the first for an international airport in Japan, saves tractor usage fees for airlines and slashes maintenance costs for Ibaraki.

When officials protested that Japan’s finicky passengers would complain about the rain, Mr. Hashimoto and his aides offered this plan: give out free umbrellas on rainy days. (Japanese people love freebies, he said.) The governor is also pushing to accept private jets, as well as a helicopter link with downtown Tokyo, and is renting out extra space for parties and conventions.

Those efforts have paid off: Landing fees for a Boeing 737 on a scheduled flight at Ibaraki are about ¥89,000, two-thirds of Narita’s ¥139,600 fee and less than half of the ¥189,600 at Haneda, according to the industry publication Orient Aviation.

Other factors may work in Ibaraki’s favor: Its finances are not as dire as many of Japan’s other airports, in part because it was built as an extension of a military air base. And foreign carriers can serve regional airports without the bilateral agreements necessary for access to Haneda and Narita, making it easier to add routes. Asiana has had difficulty adding to the six routes it flies from Seoul to Narita and Haneda, for example.

Ibaraki offers unlimited free parking, while parking costs at Narita and Haneda are sky-high, and also plans to offer bus service from central Tokyo for 500 yen, or less than $5 — a fraction of the cost it takes to travel to Narita, and comparable to the cost of reaching Haneda.

Accounting for the time it takes for the plane to taxi on Narita’s runway and the passenger to make his way through that sprawling airport, the total journey to central Tokyo from Ibaraki is about the same — less than 90 minutes — according to Katsuichi Yabunaka, an Ibaraki official.

Meanwhile, the airport serves a big market in its own right: about 20 million people live within 100 kilometers of the new airport, according to Ibaraki Prefecture.

The airport faces plenty of headwinds. Haneda and Narita are planning extensions. Japan’s economy remains depressed. Foreign arrivals in Japan are also on the decline, though the trend could change with better access, particularly by budget carriers, experts say.

The airport is expected to lose ¥20 million in its first year of operation.

Still, Ibaraki is going on a sales offensive. The airline is in discussions with low-cost carriers in China, Malaysia, Philippines and Macao. Asiana, meanwhile, is studying an additional route to the South Korean port city of Busan.

“Ibaraki is the first airport in Japan to break the mold by really focusing on cost and efficiency,” said Dongshil Hyun, executive vice president at Asiana and head of the airline’s Japan operations.

“We finally have a much-needed new and cost-efficient route to Tokyo,” he said. “How could we not be excited?”

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Okinawa voters pick anti-base mayor

Image via Wikipedia

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 24, 2010; 2:14 PM

TOKYO -- In a small town election that may have a big impact on U.S. ties with Japan, voters in Nago on Okinawa island chose a new mayor Sunday who opposes the relocation of a noisy U.S. military air base to his town.

Susumu Inamine, who said during his campaign that he did not want the air station constructed in Nago, defeated incumbent Mayor Yoshikazu Shimabukuro, who has long supported hosting the base as a way of increasing jobs and investment.

The United States and Japan agreed four years ago to move the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, now located in a dense urban area in the center of Okinawa, to Nago, a town of 60,000 in the thinly populated northern part of the tropical island. It was to have been built on landfill along a pristine coast on the edge of the town.

But to the exasperation of the Obama administration, that deal was put on hold last fall after the election of a new government led by Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who says Japan has been too passive in its dealings with the United States. Hatoyama has suggested that the base should be moved off Okinawa or out of Japan altogether -- and has also said that the outcome of the mayoral vote in Nago would be a factor in his government's final decision, which he has promised to make by May.

Inamine's anti-base campaign attracted support from environmentalists and from local members of Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan and its coalition partners, as well as from the Japanese Communist Party.

Nago's mayor avoided mention of the airbase in his campaign, saying its relocation was not a matter that could or should be decided by him or residents of his city.

That view is shared by U.S. Marine Corps commanders, who view the Futenma air station as a linchpin in the continuous training and on-call mobility of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force, which is based on Okinawa and is the only such U.S. force in the Far East.

"National security policy cannot be made in towns and villages," Lt. Gen. Keith J. Stalder, commander of Marine forces in the Pacific, said in an interview last week.

Relocating the Marine air station to Nago is a key part of a $26 billion deal between Japan and the United States to transfer 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam and turn over valuable tracts of land to people on the island. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last fall that the deal would probably collapse if the air station does not move to Nago.

Several U.S. officials said last week that they believe that senior leaders in the Hatoyama government have begun to realize that there is no workable alternative to relocating the air station as previously agreed . They also said that such an important decision should be made in Tokyo and not in a local election.

Construction of the air station in Nago would require a massive landfill in a picturesque stretch of waters now used by fishermen and snorkelers. It is opposed by environmentalists who have filed a law suit saying it would destroy habitat of the rare dugong, a manatee-like sea mammal. A Japanese government environmental assessment has said that dugongs have not been seen in the proposed construction area for many years.

For many Okinawans, the Futenma air station has become a symbol of the noise, pollution and risk of accidents that they associate with the large U.S. military presence on the island.

Surrounded by 92,000 people in Ginowan city, Futenma torments its neighbors with the comings and going of combat helicopters and transport aircraft.

In 2004, a helicopter based at the airfield crashed into the administration building of a nearby college. There were no deaths, but the incident angered local residents and led to the 2006 agreement to move the air base to Nago.

The vote in Nago does not necessarily kill the relocation of the air station. The final decision is up to the governor of Okinawa, who has shown qualified support for the base relocation plan, and the central government in Tokyo.

Shisaku: Media Shifts Make Japan A Harder Read

Image by MJTR (´･ω･) via Flickr

A note on sources of information...

I was watching the news on the resignation of Finance Minister Fujii Hirohisa on Thursday night, flipping in between the various terrestrial channels. As I flipped back and forth, I was struck by how similar the reports were on the Fuji TV and Nippon TV networks. The two newscasts were nearly identical, except for the clothing and the sets. The editorial stance, the rumors, even the vocabulary were indistinguishable. If not for the bug in the corner of my television’s screen, I would not have been able to tell which network broadcast was which.

This is a new development. Until the election of August last year Fuji TV, which is a part of the Fuji Sankei Group, and Nippon TV, which is owned by the Yomiuri Shimbun, offered the news in distinct flavors. Fuji Sankei Group news, which includes the reporting in the Sankei Shimbun newspaper, offered conservative iconoclasm with a bias toward free markets and a gnawing worry about the growing power of China. As such, Fuji Sankei news reporting found itself frequently at odds with Liberal Democratic Party government decisions. Yomiuri-flavored news, however, was strictly conformist conservatism, in near complete agreement with the course of action of the current administration, save during the years when Koizumi Jun’ichiro was prime minister.

Since the ouster of the LDP from power, however, the two formerly separate identities have grown closer to one another. Tobias Harris has already documented the glee at the Sankei Shimbun when the editors realized that the LDP's election loss made the paper a candidate to be the voice of the opposition. The Yomiuri Shimbun, bereft of the government it had seen itself as serving, has seemingly reversed a previous caution about printing every rumor, plausible or otherwise, it has in the company inbox.

The consequences of this shift toward a unitary conservative reportorial voice are appearing in the non-Japanese press. The Economist’s article this week on the Fujii resignation and Blaine Harden’s Washington Post account of the purported emergence of Ozawa Ichiro from the shadows both show a lack of skepticism toward story elements being trumpeted by the emerging unified Fuji Sankei/Yomiuri opposition news. The explanation that Fujii quit because he had lost a policy battle with Ozawa, rather than one with his own frail constitution, and that he was terrified of being called to testify in the Diet about a financial scandal involving Ozawa, are reported as fact. That Fujii had sworn that he was giving up politics last summer, only to be begged by Hatoyama to run again via a campaigning-free position on DPJ proportional list, is ignored.

Harden is at least aware of the possibility that he may be passing on a skewed version of events, although he buries this admission down in the eleventh paragraph:

But Japan's two most influential newspapers -- which are not friendly with the new government -- have detected a new form of two-headed rule. The Yomiuri newspaper calls it "dual-governance." The Asahi suggests "there is another prime minister outside the cabinet."

The Asahi Shimbun's position in the new order is an ambiguous one. It is frequently characterized as being a center-left publication. In truth, it is aspires to being a non-partisan publication, modeling itself seemingly on The New York Times. Along with its affiliated but independent TV Asahi network, it has tried to maintain a near Olympian position, criticizing the current government for failing to live up to what most ordinary persons would consider impossible standards of achievement. In terms of its purported politicial bias, the Asahi should be gentle on the new government, having waged a long, bitter war against LDP rule. It has, however, been sharply critical.

In trying so hard to remain above political partisanship, however, the Asahi editors have had trouble avoiding the trap of false equivalence. Given the length of tenure of the new government, it is impossible that every DPJ foible is equal to the multitudinous sins of the LDP. However, by failing to take the extra step of saying “we remain suspicious of the current crop of leaders but they at least better than continued rule by their predecessors” the aggressively skeptical reporting of the Asahi has worked hand-in-glove with its now strictly partisan reporting of the paper's conservative competitors.

The strong anti-DPJ government stance of the working-class oriented Mainichi Shimbun is inscrutable, at least from a readership standpoint. The owners seem convinced that the antagonistic segment of the media market can support three players. Unfortunately, Yomiuri and Sankei are set to dominate this segment. An aggressive anti-government, anti-Ozawa line only threatens the Mainichi group with ever greater marginalization. That the Mainichi Shimbun still maintains a translation department, a peculiar luxury for a downscale news organization, has been granting the Mainichi's aggressive reporting and its editorials international stature out of proportion to the organization’s status in the domestic media market.

The shift in news reporting has not gone universally against the government. While The Asahi Shimbun and TV Asahi have struggled to find an admirable independent stance, the national newscaster NHK has surged forward and become the government's most supportive news conduit. This shift is not out of sycophancy to the new power in the capital, however. NHK lived in terror of government retaliation during the LDP years. As a consequence its reporters and editors did their very best to avoid offending the government. Freed by the election from a fear of retaliation from the LDP, NHK news has responded by working with the government to rapidly dismantle the intellectual edifice that kept the LDP in power and NHK cowed. NHK and its legions of talented reporters are now free to report what they know – and they know plenty.

Given the power of NHK’s 7 pm and 9 pm newscasts to determine the national conversation on the news, the relative durability of the Hatoyama Cabinet’s popularity becomes less perplexing. Someone just reading the translated reports from the major newspapers would come away with a vision of the popular mood in Japan as being fixedly anti-Ozawa and anti-Hatoyama and rueing the results of the August election. The truth is that despite serious ongoing investigations of financial fraud in the political offices both the prime minister and the secretary-general of the DPJ, the government and the party still enjoy a large measure of public support.

In an ideal world, foreign reporters with long memories would notice the rapid shifting about in the Japanese media and adjust their sourcing accordingly. However, with most non-Japanese media organizations cutting back staff or pulling out of Japan entirely, the world is relying more and more on unfiltered retransmission what Japanese media outlets are producing. Rather than giving a clearer view of what is going on in Japan, this direct transmission has instead reflected the prejudices and weaknesses of the original outlets, resulting in the broad dissemination of reporting which is potentially more harsh and negative than the on-the-ground reality would require.

Posted by MTC at 8:51 AM

Born in Japan, but ordered out

Image by Robert Sanzalone via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A20

TOKYO -- Fida Khan, a gangly 14-year-old, told the court that immigration authorities should not deport him and his family merely because his foreign-born parents lacked proper visas when they came to Japan more than 20 years ago.

During the past two decades, his Pakistani father and Filipino mother have held steady jobs, raised children, paid taxes and have never been in trouble with the law.

"I have the right to do my best to become a person who can contribute to this society," Fida told a Tokyo district court in Japanese, the only language he speaks.

But the court ruled last year that Fida has no right to stay in the country where he was born. Unless a higher court or the Minister of Justice intervenes, a deportation order will soon split the Khan family, sending the father, Waqar Hassan Khan, back to Pakistan, while dispatching Fida and his sister Fatima, 7, to the Philippines with their mother, Jennette.

Image via Wikipedia

Aggressive enforcement of Japanese immigration laws has increased in recent years as the country's economy has floundered and the need for cheap foreign labor has fallen.

Nationality in Japan is based on blood and parentage, not place of birth. This island nation was closed to the outside world until the 1850s, when U.S. warships forced it to open up to trade. Wariness of foreigners remains a potent political force, one that politicians dare not ignore, especially when the economy is weak.

As a result, the number of illegal immigrants has been slashed, often by deportation, from 300,000 in 1995 to just 130,000, a minuscule number in comparison to other rich countries. The United States, whose population is 2 1/2 times that of Japan's, has about 90 times as many illegal immigrants (11.6 million).

Image by notariety via Flickr

Among highly developed countries, Japan also ranks near the bottom in the percentage of legal foreign residents. Just 1.7 percent are foreign or foreign-born, compared with about 12 percent in the United States. Japan held a pivotal election last year and voters tossed out a party that had ruled for nearly 50 years. But the winner, the Democratic Party of Japan, has so far done nothing to alter immigration policy.

That policy, in a country running low on working-age people, is helping to push Japan off a demographic cliff. It already has fewer children and more elderly as a percentage of its population than any country in recorded history. If trends continue, the population of 127 million will shrink by a third in 50 years and by two-thirds in a century. By 2060, Japan will have two retirees for every three workers -- a ratio that will weaken and perhaps wreck pension and health-care systems.

These dismal numbers upset Masaki Tsuchiya, who manages a Tokyo welding company that for seven years has employed Waqar Khan.

"If Khan is deported, it will not be possible to find anyone like him, as many Japanese workers have lost their hungriness," said Tsuchiya, who has urged Japanese immigration officials to rescind the deportation order for the Khan family. "When the Japanese population is declining, I believe our society has to think more seriously about immigration."

At the Ministry of Justice, immigration officials say they are simply carrying out rules politicians make. The rules, though, are not particularly precise. They grant wide leeway to bureaucrats to use their own discretion in deciding who stays and who gets deported. Last year, immigration officials granted "special permits" to 8,500 undocumented foreigners, with about 65 percent of them going to those who had married a Japanese citizen.

Exercising their discretion under the law, immigration authorities last year offered Noriko Calderon, 13, the wrenching choice of living with her parents or living in her homeland. The girl, who was born and educated in the Tokyo suburbs, could stay in Japan, the government ruled. But she had to say goodbye to her Filipino mother and father, who were deported after living illegally in Japan for 16 years. Following tearful goodbyes at a Tokyo airport, Noriko remained in Japan with an aunt.

Japan's growing need for working-age immigrants has not gone unnoticed by senior leaders in government and business. Slightly relaxed rules have admitted skilled professionals and guest workers. The number of legal foreign residents reached an all-time high of 2.2 million at the end of 2008, with Chinese accounting for the largest group, followed by Koreans, Brazilians (mostly of Japanese descent) and Filipinos.

Still, experts say these numbers are far too low to head off significant economic contraction. A group of 80 politicians said last year that the country needs 10 million immigrants by 2050. Japan's largest business federation called for 15 million, saying: "We cannot wait any longer to aggressively welcome necessary personnel."

Yet the treatment of foreign workers already in Japan is unpredictable. The government opened service centers last year to help foreign workers who lost their jobs to recession. For the first time, it offered them free language training, along with classes on social integration. As that program got underway, however, the government began giving money -- about $12,000 for a family of four -- to foreign workers, if they agreed to go home immediately and never come back to work.

The Khan family's troubles began two years, when a policeman nabbed Waqar Khan on his way home from work. He was detained for nine months. Police in Japan often stop foreign-looking people on the street and ask for residency documents.

The letter of the law was clearly against Khan and his wife. He had overstayed a 15-day tourist visa by 20 years. She came into the country on a forged passport.

But they have refused to sign deportation documents, arguing that although their papers are bad, their behavior as foreigners has been exemplary. Under Japanese law, foreigners are eligible to become naturalized citizens if they have lived in the country for more than five years, have good behavior and are self-sufficient.

The Khans also argue that their children, who regard themselves as Japanese, are assets for Japan. "It is a bit weird that the country needs children, but it is saying to us, go away," Khan said.

The family's lawyer, Gen'ichi Yamaguchi, has tried -- and so far failed -- to convince immigration officials and judges that the Khans are just the sort of hardworking, Japanese-speaking immigrants that the country should embrace for the sake of its own future.

"During the bubble years, the number of illegal workers increased a lot and the police looked the other way," Yamaguchi said. "Japan has always looked at immigrants as cheap but disposable labor."

An appeals court is scheduled to rule on the Khan case in the first week of February.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

Powerful Japanese politician Ozawa flexes his muscles as party leader falters

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By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 10, 2010; A16

TOKYO -- Shrewd, stern and baggy-eyed, Ichiro Ozawa has prowled the back rooms of power in Tokyo for more than four decades. Last year, he masterminded an election victory that crushed the political party that ruled Japan for nearly half a century.

Yet after the historic vote, as his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took power, Ozawa chose not to join the government. Instead, he served officially as his party's secretary general and unofficially as its all-powerful political wizard. The local press dubbed him the "shadow shogun."

Now, with the new government stumbling, its poll numbers sinking and another national election looming, Ozawa, 67, has stepped out of the shadows and is beginning to wave his wand.

He played a major role in undermining Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii, who resigned last week. Ozawa has also handed down directives on social spending and highways toll rates to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose leadership ability he has reportedly criticized in private.

In a remarkable display of foreign-policy chutzpah, Ozawa last month led a 645-member, five-airplane pilgrimage of lawmakers and other leaders on a visit to Beijing, where he met with Chinese Premier Hu Jintao.

The DJP has questioned the long-held traditional alliance between Japan and the United States, with Hatoyama so far refusing to follow through on relocation of a U.S. Marine base on Okinawa sought by Washington.

In Washington, Ozawa is viewed with a mixture of alarm and understanding. Some in the Obama administration portray him as a Rasputin-like character plotting to push Japan away from the United States. Others understand him as an old-time pol, more interested in winning elections than in international affairs. Ozawa, they recall, was a mastermind behind the defeat of the once powerful Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in 1993. That victory proved short-lived, though, when Ozawa botched the handling of a coalition government.

Asked to explain Ozawa's new role in governing Japan, the head of the DPJ's international department, Yukihisa Fujita, said in a statement: "Government policies are overseen by the cabinet led by prime minister Hatoyama, and party affairs by the secretary general Ozawa. There is a division of labor with close cooperation and leadership between the two."

But Japan's two most influential newspapers -- which are not friendly with the new government -- have detected a new form of two-headed rule. The Yomiuri newspaper calls it "dual-governance." The Asahi suggests "there is another prime minister outside the cabinet."

Japan's election schedule virtually guarantees that Ozawa's relative influence will expand into mid-summer, when there is a vote for the upper house of parliament. The DPJ needs to gain just seven seats in that 242-member chamber to win a majority, which would give it commanding control over parliament for several years. The party already dominates the lower house, and analysts here agree that Ozawa is likely to lead his party to another sizable win.

There is, however, a legal roadblock confronting the ever-more-visible DPJ shogun. The Tokyo prosecutor's office wants to question Ozawa about $4.31 million from his political fund that was used to buy real estate in Tokyo six years ago. Ozawa agreed this week to meet with prosecutors, although the seriousness of his legal difficulties over the unreported land purchase is not yet clear.

The investigation is an echo of a separate fundraising investigation that last year forced Ozawa to resign as head of the DPJ and forfeit his chance of becoming prime minister. In that case, as in the current one, Ozawa said his aides acted without his knowledge.

There are questions, though, about the political motivations of the Tokyo prosecutor's office, which has old allegiances to the Liberal Democratic Party, the former ruling party.

This winter, the rise of Ozawa's public profile has roughly coincided with the falling poll numbers and perceived leadership failures of Hatoyama, who took over the DPJ last summer after Ozawa stepped down as party leader.

Hatoyama's approval numbers have plummeted in the past three months from above 80 percent to below 50 percent. Part of the reason, according to newspaper polls, is indecision on key policy matters. Still, his party remains far more popular than the LDP, which has collapsed since losing the election in August and is now supported by less than 20 percent of voters.

Ozawa is a champion of the DPJ's most popular new policies, pushing to strip policymaking authority from bureaucrats and give it to elected officials. He has also forced increased transparency in how the government spends public money, opening up a process that for decades was kept behind closed doors, with decisions often made by senior bureaucrats who later took jobs in companies that received public money.

"The people see Ozawa's toughness and admire his emotional strength," said Harumi Arima, a political analyst in Tokyo. "It is because of him that people feel the DPJ will actually change things and make thing better. They feel Hatoyama is a weakling."

Other analysts say that while Ozawa is unquestionably a powerful voice in the government, he is not the only one -- and that he shares control with Hatoyama and the new finance minister and former deputy prime minister, Naoto Kan. "To say that Ozawa has single control doesn't reflect reality," said Koichi Nakano, an assistant professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo.

Still, there is a perception that Ozawa, if Hatoyama continues to stumble, may take over the government after the summer election. "Deep down, Ozawa wants to win that election and become prime minister," said Arima. "He wants the honor, as well a mark in history that he has changed Japan."

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto and staff writer John Pomfret in Washington contributed to this report.

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U.S. concerned about new Japanese premier Hatoyama

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By John Pomfret
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A08

While most of the federal government was shut down by a snowstorm last week, there was one person in particular whom Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called in through the cold: Japanese Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki.

Once he arrived, Clinton told him in blunt, if diplomatic, terms that the United States remains adamant about moving a Marine base from one part of Okinawa to another. That she felt compelled to call the unusual meeting highlights what some U.S. and Asian officials say is an alarming turn in relations with Japan since Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama led an opposition party to victory in August elections, ending an almost uninterrupted five decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.

Since the election, a series of canceled dinners, diplomatic demarches, and publicly and privately broken promises from the new government has vexed senior White House officials, causing new concern about the U.S. friendship with its closest Asian ally. The worry extends beyond U.S. officials to other leaders in Southeast Asia, who are nervous about anything that lessens the U.S. security role in the region.

A pledge of assertiveness

At the center of concern are Hatoyama and his Democratic Party of Japan. Hatoyama had campaigned on promises he would be more assertive than previous Japanese leaders in dealings with the United States. He and his coalition partners opposed parts of a $26 billion agreement between the two nations to move the Marine base to a less-populated part of Okinawa and to transfer 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam.

The United States has seen the moves as central to a new Asian security policy to assure Japan's defense and to counter the rise of China. But Hatoyama and his allies saw the agreement as the United States dictating terms, and wanted the base removed.

Increasingly, U.S. officials view Hatoyama as a mercurial leader. In interviews, the officials said he has twice urged President Obama to trust him on the base issue and promised to resolve it before year's end -- once during a meeting between the two in Tokyo last month and another in a letter he wrote Obama after the White House had privately expressed concerns about the Japanese leader's intentions.

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On Dec. 17, Hatoyama officially informed the Obama administration that he would not make a decision about the air base by the end of the year. He told Clinton the news in conversation at a dinner in Copenhagen at the conclusion of the United Nations climate-change summit.

After the dinner, Hatoyama told Japanese reporters that he had obtained Clinton's "full understanding" about Tokyo's need to delay. But that apparently was not the case. To make sure Japan understood that the U.S. position has not changed, Clinton called in the Japanese ambassador during last week's storm, apparently having some impact.

"This is a thing that rarely occurs, and I think we should take this [Clinton's action] into account," the ambassador told reporters as he left the State Department.

Hatoyama's moves have befuddled analysts in Washington. So far, most still think he and his party remain committed to the security relationship with the United States.

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They explain his behavior as that of a politician who is not accustomed to power, who needs to pay attention to his coalition partners -- one of which, the Social Democratic Party of Japan, is against any U.S. military presence in the country. They note that Hatoyama has put money aside for the base-relocation plan in Japan's budget and that other senior members of his party have told their U.S. counterparts they will honor the deal.

Shifting policy?

But some U.S. and Asian officials increasingly worry that Hatoyama and others in his party may be considering a significant policy shift -- away from the United States and toward a more independent foreign policy.

They point to recent events as a possible warnings: Hatoyama's call for an East Asian Community with China and South Korea, excluding the United States; the unusually warm welcome given to Xi Junping, China's vice president, on his trip to Japan this month, which included an audience with the emperor; and the friendly reception given to Saeed Jalili, the Iranian national security council secretary, during his visit to Japan last week.

Michael Green, senior director for Asia at the National Security Council during the Bush administration, said the concern is that senior officials in Hatoyama's party with great influence, such as Ichiro Ozawa, want to push Japan toward closer ties with China and less reliance on the United States. That would complicate the U.S. position not just in Japan but in South Korea and elsewhere.

"I think there are questions about what kind of role Ozawa is playing," Green said, adding that Ozawa has not been to the United States in a decade, has yet to meet the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos, and only grudgingly met Clinton during an earlier trip to Japan.

"The prevailing view is that this is basically a populist, inexperienced government sorting out its foreign policy," he said, "but now there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that this is something more problematic."

U.S. allies in Singapore, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines -- and Vietnamese officials as well -- have all viewed the tussle between Washington and Tokyo with alarm, according to several senior Asian diplomats.

The reason, one diplomat said, is that the U.S.-Japan relationship is not simply an alliance that obligates the United States to defend Japan, but the foundation of a broader U.S. security commitment to all of Asia. As China rises, none of the countries in Asia wants the U.S. position weakened by problems with Japan.

Another senior Asian diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid, noted that recent public opinion polls show Hatoyama's approval rating slipping below 50 percent, while Obama remains popular.

"Let's hope Hatoyama gets the message that this is not the way to handle the United States," he said.

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Rough Ride for Hatoyama After Landslide Election

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By HIROKO TABUCHI

TOKYO — A growing deficit, a spat with Washington, a campaign finance investigation and broken promises: Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s first 100 days in office in Japan have been anything but smooth.

Four months after a landslide election swept aside a half-century of virtual one-party rule, Mr. Hatoyama’s agenda for a new Japan is under threat amid policy missteps and the harsh realities facing Japan, which has the world’s second-largest economy. Further complicating his work is a vocal fringe party in his coalition that is at odds with Mr. Hatoyama over government spending plans and debt levels.

“Mr. Hatoyama needs to regain control. He is letting the tail wag the dog,” said Noriko Hama, professor of economics at the Doshisha Graduate School of Business in Kyoto. “Japan’s economy could backslide.”

Mr. Hatoyama’s Democratic Party rode to power on a promise to end pork-barrel spending on public works projects championed by the long-ruling Liberal Democrats and divert the money to tax cuts and handouts that would bolster household incomes.

In recent weeks, a government task force has staged a public review of proposed government spending for the next fiscal year, cutting budgets and demanding that projects that are not urgent be postponed or abolished.

But those cuts came to less than a fourth of the government’s target of $32.8 billion — too little to make a dent in a burgeoning budget packed with stimulus measures to drive spending and bolster employment after the country’s worst recession since World War II.

The lack of progress on budget-cutting has fed jitters over the sustainability of Japan’s public debt, which is approaching twice its gross domestic product. Analysts say the government is likely to go well beyond a limit of $480 billion, it has set for next year.

Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii reiterated Tuesday that the government would stick to that target. “The ¥44 trillion is a promise Prime Minister Hatoyama made to the public,” he said.

But tight finances forced Mr. Hatoyama to renege this week on a pledge to abolish a tax on gasoline. The government has also backtracked on a promise to eliminate highway tolls, though it vows to keep other parts of its campaign manifesto, like offering cash handouts to families raising children.

“The public understands that finances are tight,” Mr. Hatoyama told reporters Tuesday, after apologizing for going back on his word. “I am sure the public wishes for the money to be put to work to help stimulate the economy.”

Though the public has been largely patient with Mr. Hatoyama, his popularity has started to slide. Approval ratings for his government skidded to 48 percent from a post-election high of 71 percent in a weekend survey by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Mr. Hatoyama’s approval ratings began to drop after he waffled on whether to renegotiate a 2006 deal to relocate a United States air base on the island of Okinawa.

The leader has also become embroiled in a campaign finance scandal involving $4 million in donations that prosecutors say were improperly reported. He told prosecutors this week in a written statement that he had no knowledge of the money, which Japanese newspapers said may have been contributions from his wealthy family disguised as donations.

At the heart of Mr. Hatoyama’s troubles, however, is Japan’s faltering economy. Although the country technically emerged from recession earlier this year, it remains mired in a deflationary cycle of falling prices, profits, wages and spending. A sustained rise in the value of the yen has also hurt the export-dependent economy. The government has pressed Japan’s central bank to flood financial markets with money to to spur the economy, but with limited results.

As the economy has floundered, tax revenue has dried up. Mr. Fujii has said he expected tax receipts for the year ending in March to come to a 25-year low of just over $400 billion, or $100 billion less than an initial estimate. That is also less than the government’s deficit for the current fiscal year — almost $590 billion.

The shortfall is sending the government scrambling to secure resources any way it can to keep from adding to its debt. Keeping the gasoline surcharge will bring in about $27 billion, economists say. The Hatoyama administration also decided Tuesday to raise Japan’s tobacco tax by a few cents per cigarette beginning Oct. 1, Bloomberg News reported.

In the meantime, an uneasy alliance with a fringe party is threatening to send budgets even higher. At the heart of the matter is Shizuka Kamei, banking minister and head of the tiny but strategically important People’s New Party.

Last month, Mr. Kamei fought successfully for a much-larger-than-planned $78 billion supplementary budget for the current fiscal year.

A former Liberal Democrat with strong ties to the construction industry, Mr. Kamei has been vocal in calling for a return to public works, raising fears in some circles that Japan could unleash projects on a country already chock-full of dams and roads.

“Coalition governments are prone to running up budget deficits,” Ryutaro Kono, a Tokyo-based economist at BNP Paribas, warned in a recent note. “There is an incentive for each coalition member to get their pet programs approved to highlight their profile.”

Moreover, Mr. Kamei has led the charge to freeze the privatization of the state-run postal savings bank, which has long been accused of squandering domestic savings. That would undo years of reforms introduced by the Liberal Democrats themselves to resuscitate Japan’s long-stagnant economy.

Mr. Hatoyama’s government is eager to show progress on Japan’s economy as his government faces its first test at the polls in mid-2010, when voters will choose members of the upper house of Parliament.

“Mr. Hatoyama is trying to bring about change, yet he faces resistance from within his own camp,” Professor Hama of Doshisha said. “If Mr. Hatoyama isn’t careful, Japan will find itself back in the dark old days.”

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U.S., Japan remain at odds over Marine air station on Okinawa - washingtonpost.com

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By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

TOKYO -- The wrestling match between the United States and Japan over the location of the U.S. Marine air station in Okinawa is far from over -- despite President Obama's chummy visit here with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

The two leaders now warmly address each other as Barack and Yukio. But they sharply disagree over the purpose of a "high-level working group" that they announced Friday to sort out an increasingly heated dispute over the future of the Marine air station, which has become a focus of anger on Okinawa.

That southern island accommodates most of the 36,000 U.S. military personnel based in Japan. Many Okinawans, after decades of living with noisy American aircraft and rambunctious American troops, have come to associate the U.S. military presence with noise, pollution and periodic crime.

Obama explained during his quick visit here that the working group, which includes U.S. Ambassador John V. Roos and the foreign and defense ministers of Japan, would focus only on implementing a 2006 agreement in which Tokyo agreed to allow the Futenma Marine Corps air station to be relocated on Okinawa.

White House officials later insisted this did not mean that the U.S. government would reopen or renegotiate the agreement, which is part of a $26 billion military deal that involves transferring 8,000 Marines from Okinawa to Guam. The United States is treaty-bound to defend Japan in case of attack.

But Hatoyama does not agree with this narrow interpretation of the working group's authority.

On Monday, he said the formation of the working group does, indeed, mean that Japan will be able to move beyond the language of the 2006 agreement.

"If our review is merely aimed at making a decision confirming the agreement, it's meaningless," Hatoyama told reporters in Tokyo. "If we already have an answer, we don't need to hold talks."

Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan was elected in August with a promise that Japan would be less passive in its relationship with the United States, has said the air station should be moved off Okinawa or even outside Japan.

No deadline has been set for the working group's decision, but both Obama and Hatoyama said they want it made quickly.

Last month, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates warned that if Japan backs away from the 2006 agreement and decides not to allow the relocation of the air station on Okinawa, the United States would halt the transfer of 8,000 Marines to Guam and refrain from returning parcels of land to the Okinawan government.

The dispute over the air station has become the signature issue in Japan's recent efforts to assert its will in negotiations with its most important ally, as well as a symbol of Hatoyama's leadership ability. It is also the most serious sticking point in U.S.-Japanese relations in many years.

Japan Cools to America as It Prepares for Obama Visit - NYTimes.com

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By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama will arrive in Tokyo on Friday, at a time when America’s relations with Japan are at their most contentious since the trade wars of the 1990s — and back then, the fights were over luxury cars and semiconductors, not over whether the two countries should re-examine their half-century-old strategic relationship.

When Japan’s Democratic Party came to power in September, ending 50 years of largely one-party government, Obama administration officials put on an outwardly positive face, congratulating the newcomers. But quietly, some American officials expressed fears that the blunt criticism that the Japanese had directed at the United States during the political campaign would translate to a more contentious relationship.

Within weeks, those fears started to play out. The new Japanese government said the country would withdraw from an eight-year-old mission in the Indian Ocean to refuel warships supporting American efforts in Afghanistan.

The government also announced that it planned to revisit a 2006 agreement to relocate a Marine airfield on Okinawa to a less populated part of the island, and to move thousands of Marines from Okinawa to Guam.

And Japanese government officials have suddenly lost their shyness about publicly sparring with American officials, as evident in a dispute in September between Japan’s ambassador to the United States, Ichiro Fujisaki, and the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, has called for a more equal relationship with the United States, and his government wants a review of the status of forces agreement, which protects American troops from Japanese legal prosecution. Japanese citizens, and Okinawans in particular, have demanded such a review for years.

When Mr. Hatoyama met Mr. Obama in New York during the United Nations General Assembly in September, the conditions seemed ripe for a kiss-and-make-up session. At their initial meeting, Mr. Obama congratulated Mr. Hatoyama “for running an extraordinary campaign” and complimented his party for “leading dramatic change in Japan.”

Mr. Hatoyama responded with the usual diplomatic niceties, telling reporters after the meeting that “I told President Obama that the Japan-U.S. alliance will continue to be the central pillar, key pillar of the security of Japan and Japanese foreign policy.”

But there were also a few awkward moments. Mr. Hatoyama and his wife, Miyuki, were the last to arrive at a leaders’ dinner at the Phipps Conservatory on the margins of the Group of 20 economic summit meeting in Pittsburgh later that week in September. Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, had been greeting arriving guests for almost two hours. “I’m sorry we were late,” Mrs. Hatoyama apologized.

A few days later, after the Obamas and the Hatoyamas flew to Copenhagen to lobby the International Olympic Committee for the 2016 Olympics, Tokyo beat out Chicago in the first round of voting, then was bumped as Rio de Janeiro took the prize.

But all of that paled in comparison with the uproar that erupted in Japan after Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited Tokyo in October. Mr. Gates, known for speaking bluntly, pressed Mr. Hatoyama and Japanese military officials to keep their commitment on the military agreements.

“It is time to move on,” Mr. Gates said, calling Japanese proposals to reopen the base issue “counterproductive.” Then, adding insult to injury in the eyes of Japanese commentators, Mr. Gates turned down invitations to attend a welcoming ceremony at the Defense Ministry and to dine with officials there.

In the weeks since, in advance of Mr. Obama’s visit, both countries have taken pains to tone down the rancor. The Japanese government has sent several high-level officials, including members of Parliament, to Washington to take the political temperature. Besides meeting with Obama administration officials, the Japanese representatives have spoken with members of research and policy groups based in Washington, particularly experts on foreign policy issues related to Japan.

“The feelers they’ve been putting out is, ‘Please don’t push us to make a decision because if you do, you’ll hear what you don’t want to hear,’ ” said Andrew L. Oros, a professor at Washington College and the author of “Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity and the Evolution of Security Practice.”

Japan’s new government is “trying to backtrack from some of their campaign rhetoric, but it’s too soon,” Mr. Oros said.

“This was a historic election,” he added. “They overturned 50 years of conservative rule. They can’t do everything at once.”

Indeed, the new government is under political pressure at home. More than 20,000 Okinawa residents held a protest rally against the base last week, and residents have been vociferous in letting the government know that they expect it to keep its campaign promises.

Administration officials said they had no intention of letting the relationship slide. Mr. Obama will be “looking to build his relationship and his personal ties with the new D.P.J. government there,” Jeffrey A. Bader, Mr. Obama’s senior director for East Asian affairs, told reporters on Monday, using the initials for the Democratic Party of Japan. “This government is looking for a more equal partnership with the United States. We are prepared to move in that direction.”

But the United States, while tamping down the tone of the discussion, is still pressing Japan, particularly on the Okinawa base issue. Mr. Obama, in an interview on Tuesday with NHK television of Japan, said Japan must honor the agreement.

While “it’s perfectly appropriate for the new government to want to re-examine how to move forward,” Mr. Obama told NHK, he added that he was “confident that once that review is completed that they will conclude that the alliance we have, the basing arrangements that have been discussed, all those things serve the interest of Japan and they will continue.”

In an effort to defuse tensions and perhaps make up for saying it would not refuel the Indian Ocean warships, Japan said Tuesday that it would sharply increase its nonmilitary aid to Afghanistan, pledging $5 billion for a variety of projects that include building schools and highways, training police officers, clearing land mines, and rehabilitating former Taliban fighters.

But even if the military squabble is eventually resolved, Japan’s economic relationship with the United States is being altered. China has now surpassed the United States as Japan’s major trading partner, a switch that economists expect to continue as China’s economy grows.

“Japan sees its future more within Asia,” said Eswar S. Prasad, an Asia specialist and professor at Cornell University. “They feel that they owe a lot less to the U.S. right now. U.S. economic policy is hurting them in a lot of ways, particularly with the decline in the value of the dollar versus the yen.”