Reassuring and Unnerving Japan } 729
Japan’s Search for Security in the Face of Mounting
Chinese Pressure
The maritime confrontations that flared in 2010 were a lost opportunity for
Beijing. In a major rupture in Japan’s tradition of domination by the Liberal
Democratic Party, an opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan (DJP),
led by Yukio Hatoyama, took over Japan’s government starting in September
- (He remained in office until June 2010.) The DJP and Hatoyama had
campaigned and won election on a program of a less America-centric and
more Asia-centric orientation for Japan. The US-Japan relation was not an
equal one and could ensnare Japan in conflicts with China over conflicts
not related to Japan’s own interests, Hatoyama said. Japan needed a greater
degree of independence from the United States and better ties with China.
Hatoyama promised to revise a 2006 deal with the United States over an air
base on Okinawa, and once in office he ended the refueling mission of JMSDF
in the Indian Ocean in support of US operations in Afghanistan. By early
2010, Hatoyama’s government was reportedly negotiating with Beijing over a
visit by him to Nanjing (site of the infamous 1937 massacre) to deliver a state-
ment on the history issue.
Hatoyama’s brief leadership and courtship of China was doomed by sev-
eral factors. One factor was a change of mind regarding the Okinawa air
base issue, a shift directly linked to North Korea’s sinking of the Cheonan in
March 2010. The Cheonan sinking convinced Hatoyama that retention of the
US base was prudent. Hatoyama’s gestures of friendship toward Beijing also
did not produce the positive Chinese response that Hatoyama had hoped for.
An effort by Hatoyama’s foreign minister in May 2010 to initiate better ties
with China, for example, foundered in a confrontation with Foreign Minister
Yang Jiechi. The Japanese official had been so bold as to suggest that China
should consider joining the global nuclear disarmament process by reducing
rather than continually expanding its stockpile of nuclear weapons. Rather
than using the opportunity to explore development of an “East Asian com-
munity” with China and Japan at its core—one of Hatoyama’s themes—Yang
delivered a “pretty severe” rebuttal of Japan’s right to challenge China on this
topic, since it was under the US “nuclear umbrella.”^53 Yang also undertook
a “robust exchange” when his Japanese counterpart raised the issue of PLA
activities in the East China Sea. In short, Beijing did not exploit the potential
offered by Hatoyama’s desire to rebalance the Japan-US relation.
Hatoyama’s DJP successor Naoto Kan (in office from June 2010 to
September 2011) was less determined than Hatoyama to move toward greater
equidistance in the China-Japan-US triangle. Moreover, Kan’s tenure saw
China’s tacit defense of North Korea’s bombardment of Yeonpyeong Island
and the “trawler captain incident,” episodes that helped convince Kan, along
with mainstream Japanese opinion, that prudence required continued close