Obama's Japan Headache

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

President Obama has a Japan problem. I know, it’s not an issue that keeps him up at night. But when U.S. ties with its most important Asian ally get ugly over security rather than semiconductors, the world must be changing.

Certainly Japan is. Having voted out the shoguns of the Liberal Democratic Party who ruled for more than a half-century, and declared war on the bureaucracy that greased the pork-barrel deals of that long dominion, the Japanese are taking a new look at the power that wrote their Constitution and underwrote their assumptions: the United States.

As a result there are troubles. Reliable Japan is now restive Japan. It’s talking about a more “equal partnership” — read less subservient. Acquiescence has given way to argument.

I find that normal in that Japan has just gone through a political change as dramatic in its way as any post-Cold-War demolition of a single-party dominated, American-backed status quo.

(More here.)