Obama ‘Panda-Huggers’ Stoke Japan’s Anxiety Over U.S. Relations

By Bradley K. Martin and Sachiko Sakamaki

Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- When Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso telephoned to congratulate Barack Obama on his November election, he told the president-elect that strengthening the alliance with the U.S. was his “top” foreign-policy priority.

Japan’s leaders are afraid Aso’s sentiments aren’t reciprocated.

Paralyzed by a political stalemate that has given it three prime ministers in two years and enmeshed in the first recession since 2001, Japan is now suffering from an attack of angst over what is widely perceived to be the U.S.’s greater focus on China. No matter that it’s still the most powerful American ally in the region and home to the Seventh Fleet, Japan isn’t feeling the love.

“Japan may face a difficult situation with the Obama administration,” said Kohei Ohtsuka, 49, author of “Japan Missing” and the opposition Democratic Party of Japan’s vice policy chief. “Japan-U.S. ties may be at risk.”

Columnist Hiro Yuasa of the Sankei newspaper, using a derogatory term for a Sinophile, said: “There may be even more panda-huggers under new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

To Japan, U.S. regard matters. Under an American security umbrella after defeat in World War II, Japan rose from a nation struggling to feed its people to the world’s second-largest economy. Growth depends on exports to the U.S., its top customer. U.S. Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer says a change in that postwar hierarchy is difficult to accept.

‘Still No. 1’

“The U.S. is still No. 1 but Japan worries about who’s No. 2 or No. 3,” Schieffer, 61, told reporters on Jan. 8. “It’s this business about who’s going to project power in the 21st century that worries everybody.”

So far, this century in Asia has belonged to China, whose economy this week passed Germany’s to become the world’s third- largest after the U.S. and Japan, expanding 13 percent from a year earlier.

Japanese gross domestic product, by contrast, may have shrunk as much as 12 percent on an annualized basis last quarter, Barclays Capital predicts. Exports fell 26.7 percent in November, the sharpest decline since at least 1980.

Ohtsuka says he is worried about what he calls a “shift to the right among people trying to elevate Japan’s power by other than economic means. I’d like to ask the Obama administration to understand the delicate emotions and sentiment among Japanese and Chinese people.”

Misplaced Concerns?

From the U.S. vantage point, Japan’s concerns are misplaced. Ties are likely to remain strong under the new administration, said retired Admiral William Fallon, who met frequently with both Japanese and Chinese officials during his 2005-2007 tenure as head of the U.S. Pacific Command.

“It’s in our best interest to maintain our relationship with our No. 1 security partner in the region,” Fallon said in an interview. “While at the same time we would like to strengthen our relations with China, there is no reason we can’t do both. This is not a zero-sum game.”

That isn’t the way Japan sees it. National anxieties were further fueled by the selection of Clinton: In an article in Foreign Affairs a year ago, she wrote that the U.S. relationship with China “will be the most important bilateral relationship in the world” this century. To the Japanese, that evoked memories of Mike Mansfield’s assertion more than 20 years ago, when he was the American ambassador, that the U.S.-Japan rapport was “the world’s most important, bar none.”

Gulf of Aden

Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party is doing all it can to bolster the partnership as Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration nears, including proposing new laws that would let Japan send ships to the Gulf of Aden to battle pirates off the coast of Somalia. The country’s post-World War II constitution prohibits the use of force to settle international disputes.

Even before Obama’s election, Japan was reaching out to its Asian neighbors to repair relations strained under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who left office in 2006. Koizumi alienated China and South Korea with visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, where criminals from World War II are among those memorialized.

Koizumi’s successor, Shinzo Abe, made his first state visit to China, and then went to South Korea. Aso, 68, who angered Japan’s neighbors with inflammatory comments before becoming prime minister, traveled to South Korea on Jan. 11-12 and met with counterpart Lee Myung Bak. Five years ago, he said Koreans forced to take Japanese family names during the country’s 1910- 1945 occupation had actually done so by choice.

Ipod Volume

“Aso has turned down the anti-China, anti-Korea volume on his iPod,” said Richard Samuels, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In Clinton’s Jan. 13 Senate confirmation hearing, she named China six times, saying it is “critically important” and will change the “global landscape.” She mentioned Japan twice, stressing its role in six-party talks on North Korea and calling it “a cornerstone of America policy in Asia.”

“There’s concern the U.S. will have to dedicate more time to China,” said Taro Kono, 45, chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the lower house for the LDP. “It’s a fact that the personal connections between the U.S. and Japan are weakening.”

Obama may approach Japan in a “pragmatic” manner, said Kenneth Lieberthal, who was an Asia national-security specialist in Bill Clinton’s White House from August 1998 to October 2000.

“How effective the relationship is will depend in no small part on how effective Japan is in working with the Obama administration” on such issues as climate change and North Korean nuclear proliferation, said Lieberthal, now a visiting fellow at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

With Aso’s approval rating below 20 percent, the DPJ may become the first opposition party in history to defeat the LDP in lower house elections, ending its more than 50-year grip on government.

“Japan is a great power that can contribute in a major way to an emerging international order,” Schieffer said. “It would be a tragedy if domestic politics kept that from happening.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Bradley K. Martin in Tokyo at bmartin18@bloomberg.netSachiko Sakamaki in Tokyo at Ssakamaki1@bloomberg.net;