Japan As An American Client-State

The standards on this board for what qualifies as political and non-political discussion are hilariously biased and selectively enforced, but in any case, here I am in General Discussion rather than the aviation threads to which the discussion is most pursuant.

Some folks will recall that a while back Japan conducted an evaluation of the Super Hornet, Typhoon, and F-35 platforms/proposals before settling on the latter to fulfil its requirement for an F-4 replacement. At the time I argued the seemingly radical thesis that Typhoon was actually well positioned to secure the contract, including from a political perspective.

We all know what happened with the contract, and we also know what happened to the reformist DPJ government. And here is an article by renowned Japan commentator Karel van Wolferen that could potentially connect the two as manifestations of a broader counter-reform push emanating not only from conservative sectors within Japan, but aided and abetted from Washington:

One of this new government’s first moves was to initiate a new China policy. Its main architect, Ichiro Ozawa, had filled several planes with writers, artists, and politicians to visit China for the specified purpose of improving “people to people and party to party” relations. At the same time, the prime minister of this first cabinet, Yukio Hatoyama, was openly declaring his intention to join other East Asian leaders in the formation of an Asean+3 community, consisting of the existing Asean grouping plus Korea, China and Japan. It is highly unlikely that the now diplomatically ruinous and possibly dangerous Sino-Japanese conflict over the Senkaku/Diyaou islands would have come into being if his cabinet had lasted.

[….]

This is not how the newspapers have reported on it, and not how it has entered commonly understood recent history, but let this sink in: Washington managed, without the use of violence, to manipulate the Japanese political system into discarding a reformist cabinet. The party that had intended to begin clearing up dysfunctional political habits that had evolved over half a century of one-party rule lost its balance and bearings, and never recovered. Hatoyama’s successor, Kan Naoto, did not want the same thing happening to him, and distantiated himself from the foreign policy reformists, and his successor in turn, Yoshihiko Noda, helped realign Japan’s bureaucracy precisely to that of the United States where roughly it had been for half a century.