hankyoreh

US President Donald Trump

As I watch the mainstream Japanese media stirring up anti-Korean sentiment day after day with its calls for the removal of the comfort woman statue in Busan, I seethe with frustration. Even so, there are moments when I feel that the Japanese are in the same boat as South Koreans are - when I see their baffled response to the emergence of President Donald Trump.

Trump disparaged the significance of the US-Japan alliance by repeatedly arguing during his campaign last year that the US has to help Japan if it‘s attacked but that Japan doesn’t have to help the US if it’s attacked. In addition, he basically scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe worked hard to implement.

That’s not all. Since his inauguration, Trump has taken every opportunity to make aggressive remarks about Japan‘s automobile industry and its exchange rate policy. In an attempt to appease Trump on these points, Abe is expected to unveil a bilateral economic cooperation plan called the “US-Japan Growth and Employment Initiative” during a summit with Trump on Feb. 10.

Why would a country as proud and obstinate as Japan be acting so obsequiously? It’s because Japan has reached the conclusion that “the US-Japan alliance is the only pillar of the country’s foreign affairs and security policy” (as Abe put it in his policy speech on Jan. 20). Amid the changing circumstances in East Asia epitomized by the rise of China and the relative decline of the US, Japan has decided that it “must resist China by strengthening its alliance with the US,” and it finished the job of strengthening that alliance under the administration of Barack Obama. It has placed all its eggs in one basket, and to protect them, it’s paying an immense price for its alliance with the US.

The price of the alliance is changing various aspects of the lives of the Japanese. On Jan. 21 and 22, I visited the city of Iwakuni, in Yamaguchi Prefecture, which is turning into the largest military base in the Far East - even bigger than Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa. A long-standing desire of the residents of Iwakuni was a construction project to relocate the runway of Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, which had been the source of much noise pollution, about 1km further into the ocean. The project began in Mar. 1997, and the dirt needed to reclaim land from the sea was acquired by bulldozing a hill called Atago, with an elevation of 120 meters, located in the middle of the city. After that, the city of Iwakuni and Yamaguchi Prefecture worked on developing the former site of the hill into a large housing project that could accommodate 1,300 households, or about 6,500 people.

“There were expectations that once this project was completed, the residential environment in Iwakuni would be greatly improved,” said Hiroshi Okamura, 73, leader of a local civic group called Defenders of Atago Hill.

But this plan fell through. As part of the redeployment plan for US troops that was finalized in May 2006, the decision was made to relocate Carrier Air Wing Five, a squadron of aircraft on a US aircraft carrier, from its current location at Yokota Air Base, near Tokyo, to Iwakuni. After this, the Japanese government and Yamaguchi Prefecture tore up the plan for the housing development that residents had requested and arbitrarily froze already promised subsidies for the construction of a new government office to pressure the mayor at the time into complying. What is currently being built on the site is a luxury housing development for American officers who are moving to the area. The cost of construction is being entirely covered by Japanese taxpayers.

South Korea has paid every bit as much for its US alliance as Japan. We have provided the US a huge base in the middle of our capital, nearly 1 trillion won (US$868 million) a year in contributions to shared defense costs and even the “clean” bodies of women who underwent STD testing. And now we‘re being asked which side we’re on through the deployment of the THAAD missile defense, which could lead to a rupture in our relations with China.

The alliance must not cost more than we’re able to pay. It’s extremely dangerous to put everything that is so precious to us into one basket.

By Gil Yun-hyung, Tokyo correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]