Posted by Tobias Harris on February 2, 2010. Filed under Japan.

While I have written a guest post for the Asia Security Initiative Blog in the past (see here), this is my first post as a regular contributer to the blog. Accordingly, I thought a brief introduction might be in order.

Since 2006 I have blogged about Japanese politics and foreign policy at the blog Observing Japan, and in more recent years I have been a regular contributer to the now (sadly) defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal Asia, and Newsweek International, as well as occasionally commenting on Japanese political developments on television and radio programs. All of that is in addition to my “day” job as a doctoral student in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In my contributions to this blog I will be analyzing the changes afoot in Japan’s foreign policy, especially its relationship with the United States, its most important ally for the past half century, and its relationship with China, its most important trading partner. In some ways last year’s election of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was the catalyst for marked shifts in Japan’s foreign relations — most notably the dispute with the U.S. over the future of the Futenma air base in Okinawa — but in other ways the government of Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio is building on a “rebalancing” of Japanese foreign policy that began even before the DPJ unseated the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Japan is in the early stages of a fundamental debate on its foreign policy that could result in greater distance from the U.S., although for social and economic reasons (not to mention strategic reasons) perhaps not too distant. In short, in my contributions here I hope to show how Japanese foreign policy making is shaped and constrained by domestic political factors.

With that as an introduction, I would like to link to this recent op-ed I wrote for the Wall Street Asia in which I discuss the consequences of a mayoral election in the small Okinawan city of Nago on the U.S.-Japan relationship.