Yukio Hatoyama’s new worries about US overseas military bases could be doing Washington a big favour

Sep 5th, 2009 | By | Category: In Brief
Yukio Hatoyama, right, leader of Democratic Party of Japan, who will become prime minister September 16, and his wife Miyuki, smile for the media after casting their votes for the August 30 Japanese election. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye).

Yukio Hatoyama, right, leader of Democratic Party of Japan, who will become prime minister September 16, and his wife Miyuki, smile for the media after casting their votes for the August 30 Japanese election. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye).

Japan still has the second largest national economy in the world today, measured in US dollars. (The 15 largest are, in descending order: United States, Japan, China, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Brazil, Russian Federation, Spain, Canada, India, Mexico, Australia, and South Korea.)

So it is perhaps not surprising that after the United States voted for change with Barack Obama last fall, Japan should do something similar on August 30, 2009 – when it gave Yukio Hatoyama’s  Democratic Party a landslide electoral victory that “marks the end of 50 years of one-party hegemony by the Liberal Democratic Party.”

It does not seem entirely accidental either that the new Japanese prime-minister-designate met his wife, Miyuki, in northern California many years ago. And she is “an outgoing former actress with an interest in spirituality who says she shares a common ‘sensibility’ with Michelle Obama …who is due to visit Tokyo later this year” (with her husband of course).

Yukio Hatoyama will not even be officially sworn in as Japan’s new prime minister until Wednesday, September 16. Yet already he seems to be discovering, like President Obama in this “Summer of Our Discontent,” that change is not easy. Already it is being said that: “To restore prosperity, Yukio Hatoyama must defeat the aversion to change that did in Japan’s last saviour”(the “Elvis-loving” Junichiro Koizumi).

Already as well, Yukio Hatoyama (known as “the alien” even among his Japanese political colleagues “for his quirky hairstyle and eccentric manner”) has upset some in “Washington’s military and diplomatic establishments” with vague ruminations about his party’s traditional “policy which demands significant downsizing of the deployment of 60,000 American troops in Japan and the removal of the Marines air wing base on Okinawa island.”

Given current US budget pressures, Mr. Hatoyama could be doing Washington a big favour. He is at least bringing countervailing forces to bear on the enormously expensive “865 facilities in more than 40 countries and overseas US territories,” still maintained by the “military-industrial complex” that General Eisenhower warned about in 1961. The counterweights editors have asked  me to point out that the intriguing current work on this subject by the California political scientist (and former cold warrior and Japan expert), Chalmers Johnson, will be explored at greater length in a future posting. For a preview, check out “America’s military empire is bleeding the country dry,” and/or “Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire: And Ten Steps to Take to Do So.”

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