Word: powerizers
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...home, Hatoyama's ideas have struck a chord with those who want their country to chart a new course. For decades - ever since its defeat in World War II, in fact - Japan has struggled to define its role in the world. Though in many respects a political and economic power in its own right, Japan has remained reliant on the U.S. for its own security. (Japan's postwar constitution renounces the use of force in international disputes.) The stabilizing presence of the U.S. military in Asia is as crucial as ever to Japan, which shares the same neighborhood...
...office to breathe new life into an ossified political system that proved incapable of reversing the slow-motion decline of Japan's economy and global influence, a phenomenon the Japanese call "Japan passing." Thirty years ago, Japan was much like the China of today, an up-and-coming global power with an economy that was the envy of the world. Japanese companies such as Sony, Toyota and Honda shoved aside their competition from the West. By the late 1980s, Americans came to see Japan's economic firepower as arguably a bigger threat to U.S. global dominance than the nuclear arsenal...
...that way, Hatoyama's new foreign policy may be simply acknowledging the changing global balance of power. "Everyone understands that Japan's foreign policy is going to have to accommodate China," says Smith, of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Japan lives right next door." But that fact will also make it difficult for Japan to drift too far from its close alliance with the U.S. Hatoyama "is trying to move Japan closer to Asia to get more autonomy from the U.S.," explains Ellis Krauss, a professor of Japanese politics at the University of California at San Diego. But Japan...
...Hatoyama would not necessarily disagree with any of that. He insists, after all, that he does not see "any contradiction" between close ties with the U.S. and with Asian powers. There is no reason to doubt he means what he says. But this isn't the mid-1950s. Anyone who thinks the balance of power in Asia is not changing - and with it the strength of the U.S., even among its old allies - hasn't been there lately...
Still, some people say they are wary of the army's intentions - and its omnipresence. They fear that a military accustomed to being in control is unlikely to relinquish power and give up its space to civilian institutions. Lt. Col. Abbas dismisses such concerns. "Pulling [the military] back is the decision of the political government. Whenever they require us, we're here. If they say we are no more required, again we're happy," he says. "But since we're sitting here in the valley, we are reconstructing." And not going after the extremists in North Waziristan...