Treading on eggshells

Following the Foreign Ministry's admission Saturday, the ruling Democratic Party of Japan now has the delicate task of dealing with the Japanese public who, for decades, were led to believe, through such acts as the LDP's continued "cycle of denial", that their country's three non-nuclear principles were being upheld by their government.

From the time of the decimation of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki prefectures at the end of WWII, to the present day, Japanese public sentiment has become increasingly opposed to the presence of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, in its waters and its skies and indeed the Japanese people are, generally speaking, staunch supporters of nuclear non-proliferation globally.

The three principles of not possessing, manufacturing or permitting nuclear weapons into Japanese territory, were first outlined by Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1967, amid negotiations over the return of Okinawa from the US The Diet formally adopted the principles in 1971.

Since then every prime minister of Japan has publicly reaffirmed the "Three Non-Nuclear Principles" as outlined by Sato and now Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and the ruling DPJ must tread a very thin line between holding former administrations accountable for deceiving generations of anti-nuclear citizens and not further straining ties with an already testy Washington.

If the DPJ fail to address and amend the 1960 security treaty between Japan and the US in an open and transparent manner, then the newly-elected party who has vowed to chart a more "politically independent" course that is less reliant on military and economic ties with the US, will be seen as toothless -- as has been the case with previous LDP administrations, whose leaders have been caricatured as Washington's puppets in the political columns of respected broadsheets.

Analysts have commented that Washington is having a tough time adjusting to Japan's new political ideologies after half a century of almost unbroken LDP rule, which put the Japan-US alliance at the core of its diplomacy.

Further adding to the strain on the DPJ's embryonic relationship with Washington and despite President Obama's recent goodwill visit to Japan, during which he reaffirmed the importance of the US-Japan alliance, is the DPJ's re-examination of the 2006 US-Japan Roadmap for Realignment and Implementation.

This plan outlines a wholesale strategic repositioning of US forces in Okinawa. The Japanese government are seeking to relocate a key air facility outside of Okinawa, or even outside Japan to lessen base-hosting burdens on the local population -- a proposal cited by US officials as potentially "testing ties with Japan's new government."

Added to this the fact that Japan's Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa has recently stated his intentions to terminate the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's refueling missions in the Indian Ocean, in support of US-led antiterrorism operations in and around Afghanistan, and will pull out its two naval ships when their current mandate expires in January, and the potential for increased diplomatic tension in the near future between Japan and the US is more than tenable, according to analysts.

The US is adamant that its role as a nuclear deterrent in the Asia-Pacific region is paramount to its own national security and those of the region it purports to protect and thus has called for bilateral security relations between the two nations to not be damaged or compromised in any way.

In October, the US Secretary of Defense and Pentagon's top-official Robert Gates resolutely warned Japan during a visit to Tokyo that it should not let its ongoing probe into an alleged secret Japan-US nuclear pact, damage bilateral relations or undermine the US nuclear deterrence in the area.

The US defense ministry has stated that the secret pact issue is Japan's "domestic matter," however if the DPJ's recent maneuvers away from US military mandates are anything to go by, it would be reasonable to surmise that the secret pact issue, far from being a simple domestic matter, may call for the US to respond to resolute diplomatic action from the DPJ, itself now under immense public scrutiny and pressure to ratify Japan's original commitment to it's three non-nuclear principles, as outlined in 1967 -- a commitment that has united a nation and inspired a myriad of denuclearization initiatives across the globe.