On June 30th, Moscow's RT posted an extraordinary interview with former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. A longtime fixture in Japanese politics, Hatoyama is one of the few opposition figures to lead Japan since 1955 and remains the only Japanese leader courageous enough to stand up to the United States and its relentless demands on Japan to abandon its peace constitution and remilitarize.
One quote stood out: "We should create a Japan without military bases," Hatoyama told RT. That suggestion would undo over 70 years of US military domination that began in 1952, when the United States imposed a separate peace on Japan that forced it to host US military bases into perpetuity. From that moment on, the Japanese archipelago has been America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the Pacific, as former PM Yasuhiro Nakasone confirmed in 1983.
The timing of the RT interview is notable, coming as Japan's current Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is reeling from President Trump's demands that Japan expand its already formidable military budget to match NATO's increases, join the Pentagon in its war plans for China, and open it markets to US automobiles and rice if it wants to avoid massive tariffs that could destroy its fragile export economy.
The tensions came to a head a few days before the interview, when Ishiba's government cancelled top-level meetings with Washington after the Trump administration demanded that Japan boost its military spending to 3.5 percent of GNP, higher than its earlier request of 3 percent and three times greater than its historical levels. Ishiba tartly responded that other nations do not decide Japan's defense budget, only Japan.
The pressure to increase military spending has been long in coming. "The new, higher demand [on Japan] was made in recent weeks by Elbridge Colby, the third-most senior official at the Pentagon, and sparked anger in Tokyo," the Financial Times reported when it broke the story of Ishiba’s cancellation. "The tension over security issues comes as the allies hold tough trade talks after President Donald Trump in April imposed 'reciprocal' tariffs on Japan."
The tensions worsened on July 4th, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio called off his first visit to Japan and South Korea, ostensibly to focus on Middle East issues. This was widely seen as a slap to both leaders for their reluctance to go along with Trump's imperial trade agenda. The failure of the trade talks became apparent on Monday, when Trump released letters to Japan and South Korea informing them he will impose 25 percent tariffs on their exports to the United States. “These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country," Trump gratuitously told his closest Asian allies.
But the Hatoyama quote that most stuck out was his wish for a Japan without military bases. People who follow Japan's close relationship with Washington were struck that such a statement from a Japanese politician has not been heard since the Liberal Democratic Party established itself in 1955 (with millions of secret dollars from the CIA) as the most unctuously pro-American regimes in the world.
"Wow," exclaimed S.L. Kanthan, the Indian geopolitical analyst, when he posted the RT interview to his 173,000 followers on Twitter/X, accompanied by an emoji with star-struck eyes and a big smile. Reading that, I reposted the clip of Hatoyama on my feed. "Love this guy," I wrote in response.
As I explained to my followers, I interviewed Hatoyama twice before and heard amazing stories about his brutal mistreatment in 2009 at the hands of former President Barack Obama over Hatoyama's insistence - supported by the Japanese people who had just elected him - that the US Marines leave Okinawa. The former PM also explained how he came to the conclusion that Japan's only chance at long-term security lies in kicking US military bases completely out of Japan.
Before getting to those remarks, which appeared in The Nation and South Korea's Newstapa, it's important to review the startling views Hatoyama expressed last week to RT about Iran, NATO, and the America military dominance of Japan 80 years after World War II.
Hatoyama, dissident to the LDP elite
Hatoyama, a soft-spoken man with an elegant and patrician air, has been around for decades. His father was foreign minister during the 1970s and grandfather was prime minister 20 years before. As the former leader of the now-defunct opposition Democratic Justice Party, he is known inside Japan and overseas as a dissident to the LDP's decades-long subservience to US military interests.
He began his RT interview by talking about Trump’s "obliteration" bombing of Iran and why he was glad PM Ishiba (like South Korean President Lee Jae Myung) didn’t go to the NATO meeting several days later. At that session, European leaders embarassed themselves before the world by calling Trump "daddy" and praising Trump's sneak attack of B-2 bombers on Iran's nuclear factories. Ironically, Trump's bombing of Iran took place as Washington was engaged high-level negotiations with the government in Tehran - much like the Imperial Japanese did to FDR at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Ishida made the right decision by skipping the NATO meeting, Hatoyama said, adding, “I don’t think Japan should be involved in NATO.” He used that as an opening to talk about the dangers of Japan harnessing itself to the US-NATO military agenda, particularly with China, which could lead to Japanese involvement in a war it has not sought.
“There are certainly many US military bases in Japan," Hatoyama told RT. "For example, in the event of an emergency in Taiwan, US military aircraft could fly from US military bases to Taiwan, and there is a risk that US military bases in Japan would be targeted in response. He added: "Therefore, even it takes time in the future, I think we should create a Japan without US military bases. I believe that the situation in which Japan’s defense, security and peace being protected by US military bases should be [reformed] as soon as possible."
Hatoyama also eluded to the rash of US military sexual violence in Okinawa, the Japanese territory where 70 percent of US forces in Japan are concentrated and is now the front line of the US Cold War on China. The situation is so dire there that US commanders in Japan made a rare (but totally perfunctory) apology on July 3rd to Okinawan officials about the US troops' misbehavior and "the anxiety this has caused the people of Okinawa."
But Hatoyama explained to RT that such behavior will continue under the legal system governing US forces in Japan and signed in 1952.
The Japan-US Status of Forces Agreement is a system where even if US military soldiers commit various violent crimes, it is difficult for Japan to get immediately involved. As a result, various assaults, incidents, and sexual crimes still occur. I believe that this should never happen, and that the Japanese government should make more strict requests to the US government about this. But I believe we are still in an era where the Japanese government is unable to speak out strongly to the US.
I believe this is an issue that goes to the very core of Japan-US security. And if things like this continue, like the time when during the PM [Ryutaro] Hashimoto administration, when Ambassador [Walter] Mondale was in office, a US soldier committed a sexual assault [and gang-rape] against a Japanese girl, and it was a very serious situation. And it was said this was an issue that went straight to the core of Japan-US security, and if things continued as they were the Japanese people might get angry and US military bases might be asked to leave. [Hashimoto and President Bill Clinton brokered a deal to close the Futenma US Marine base, near where the rape occurred, but on the condition that Japan build a new base in the northern part of Okinawa].
"In a sense, such things are still happening today," Hatoyama told RT. "But I can’t help but feel that the Japanese people’s response to these crimes committed by the US military has become weaker."
Hatoyama knows this, because he lost power as a direct result of the pressure exerted on his DJP government by the Obama administration over Okinawa. The full story of his confrontation with the allegedly liberal, "antiwar" president and his Secretary of State, Hilllary Clinton, has never been told in full in the US media, yet says volumes about the true nature of the US-Japan relationship. Eight years after my interview with Hatoyama, I present the story here for the first time.
Obama and Clinton's Asia Pivot
I met Hatoyama in Washington in 2018 during the brief period of peace negotiations between DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, then-South Korean President Moon Jae In, and Donald Trump. At the time, Trump and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe - America's favorite leader of the postwar era - had agreed on a “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea based on tough sanctions combined with threats of military action. Hatoyama told me he had a fundamental disagreement with Abe's approach, as did Korea's Moon.
“Japan’s role should be to create the conditions for North Korea to come to the negotiating table” and not to increase the pressure on Pyongyang, Hatoyama said. In his view, Japan should work with South Korea and China to convince the United States and North Korean to begin talks towards a peace treaty. That could be done, he said, through a proposal endorsed by China under which North Korea would halt its nuclear weapons development in return for a lifting of some sanctions and a postponement of the massive US-South Korean military exercises still going on.
He was prescient, because the talks collapsed in 2019 precisely because Trump would not drop any sanctions. While he did suspend military exercises for a while, they quickly resumed in 2019 and deepened - with Japanese military involvement - under the imperial presidency of Joe Biden from 2017 to 2022.
At the time of our interview, Hatoyama was in Washington to discuss with the US Congress the sensitive issue of US bases in Okinawa. That was the issue that led the Obama administration, led by Kurt Campbell and Hillary Clinton, to confront Hatoyama and senior members of his DJP in 2009.
In the two years before Hatoyama took office, the Obama administration was deep into its "Pacific Pivot" of transferring US military forces to Asia from the Middle East (the phrase was invented by Campbell and popularized by Clinton). And with the pro-American Shinzo Abe and his allies in power in Tokyo, the US and Japan had agreed that Japanese forces would play a critical auxiliary role to the American military as it made this shift. They sought an alignment that would to “transform” Japan’s military into a more supportive adjunct to the Pentagon in US military operations abroad.
Writing In The Nation, I asked "Could Japan Become America's Proxy Army?" The answer, as we know now, was a resounding yes. But to the Obama administration's consternation, Hatoyama was undermining this plan by running on a platform to defang the LDP and alter the terms of the US-Japan military alliance.
Specifically, Hatoyama wanted to make public the secret agreements the LDP had made with Washington—including allowing the US military to bring nuclear weapons in and out of Japan—and reduce the burden of the enormous complex of US bases in Okinawa. This ran counter to the wishes of Obama and Clinton, who desperately wanted to retain the US forward base in Okinawa, deepen the US-Japan military alliance, and keep the LDP in power. They had no use for a renegade opposition that put Japan's interests above America's.
“Of course, our initiatives didn’t settle well with the United States," Hatoyama wryly told me years later.
Kurt Campbell and Hillary Clinton take the lead
The Democrats' deep fondness for the right-wing LDP and its pro-militarist policies was underscored shortly before Hatoyama's election when Michele Flournoy, Obama's Under Secretary of Defense, was sent to Tokyo to warn Hatoyama's party that his policies would have serious repercussions for US-Japan relations. A secret memo obtained by Wikileaks illustrated how badly the “progressive” Obama administration wanted Japanese voters to retain the LDP.
“A defeat of LDP will introduce an element of uncertainty into our Alliance relations with Japan," Flournoy was told. She was instructed to meet with DPJ leaders “to re-enforce [the] importance of implementing the [US-Japan] transformation and realignment agenda.” The leaked memo went on to show how little respect Obama and his people had for Japan and its democracy.
"The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) has voiced strong support for the Alliance per se, but many leading DPJ politicians oppose funding the move [of the US Marines] to Guam, the Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF) plan, and Japan's role in Indian Ocean refueling and anti-piracy operations. It is unclear at this point how much of their policy pronouncements are campaign rhetoric and how much are serious declarations of policy shifts under a DPJ government."
Flournoy was ordered to get Hatoyama in line.
Significant ideological differences within the DPJ make it difficult to predict the impact on bilateral relations of a DPJ government. The party's "big tent" includes old-line socialists on one side and pragmatic defense intellectuals who would be comfortable in the LDP on the other. Your meeting with DPJ leaders will be an opportunity to elicit their views and to re-enforce with the DPJ importance of implementing the transformation and realignment agenda.
Here was an Obama official telling Japan’s most important opposition party – and the millions of Japanese expected to vote for it in the next election – to basically abandon their principles and stick with the ruling party’s pro-American agenda.
But the strategy backfired. In August 2009, Japanese voters threw out the LDP and, to the consternation of the Obama administration, ushered in a new era of actual progressive rule in Japan. Here’s how the Times reported the election and its implications, on August 31, 2009.
Japan's voters cast out the Liberal Democratic Party for only the second time in postwar history on Sunday, handing a landslide victory to a party that campaigned on a promise to reverse a generation-long economic decline and to redefine Tokyo's relationship with Washington.
In the powerful lower house, the opposition Democrats virtually swapped places with the governing Liberal Democratic Party, winning 308 of the 480 seats, a 175 percent increase that gives them control of the chamber, according to the national broadcaster NHK. The incumbents took just 119 seats, about a third of their previous total. The remaining seats were won by smaller parties.
''This has been a revolutionary election,'' Yukio Hatoyama, the party leader and presumptive new prime minister, told reporters. ''The people have shown the courage to take politics into their own hands.''Mr. Hatoyama, who is expected to assemble a government in two to three weeks, has spoken of the end of American-dominated globalization and of the need to reorient Japan toward Asia. His party's campaign manifesto calls for an ''equal partnership'' with the United States and a ''reconsidering'' of the 50,000-strong American military presence here.
That had to be stopped. As I reported in The World According to US Empire, a 2016 book based on US diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, the Obama administration successfully pressured Hatoyama to change his policies - and then drove him out of office. That was accomplished by dispatching the most senior diplomats and Pentagon officials in the administration to argue with the DJP that Hatoyama’s proposals threatened US national-security interests and the US-Japan military alliance itself.
Campbell and Fluornoy go in for the kill
The diplomatic offensive was led by Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, with the able assistance of Michele Flournoy. They were old partners from Clinton's Pentagon, where Flournoy was under secretary of defense for policy (she crafted the Obama administration's counter-insurgency policy in Afghanistan, and helped persuade Obama to intervene militarily in Libya, according to her biography in Wikipedia).
In 2007, Campbell and Flournoy co-founded the Center for a New American Security, a military think tank closely aligned with the Democratic Party that continues to play a key role in US policy in Asia today. Campbell went on to become President Biden's "Asia Czar" and Deputy Secretary of State, where he played a critical role in creating the US trilateral military partnership with Japan and South Korea.
Flournoy, who nearly became Biden’s Secretary of Defense before getting blocked by a liberal campaigners, stayed in the private sector as managing partner of WestExec Advisors, the consultancy that also produced Tony Blinken, Biden's unctuous Secretary of State (its purpose is the epitome of national security capitalism: to bring “the Situation Room to the Board Room.”)
I profiled Flourney, Campbell, Blinken, and their crew of imperial sycophants in a 2020 article for The Nation. She now sits on the board of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors, and her bio there underscores the corrupt nature of her career serving the national security state.
Hatoyama undermined
Back to 2009 and Flornoy’s mission for the empire. Once Hatoyama was sworn in, she and Campbell made many visits to Tokyo. Their purpose was to persuade Hatoyama’s government not to reverse the agreement made with Abe and the LDP to reduce the US Marine presence at Futenma by instead building a new Marine facility at Henoko in Okinawa's far north. In his meeting with the DJP leaders, Campbell made it clear that Hatoyama’s plans were unpalatable and unacceptable.
A/S Campbell flagged as areas of concern [Hatoyama's] announced intention to pursue historical issues related to the so-called secret agreement on the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan, implementation of the base realignment agreement in Okinawa/Guam, revisions to the SOFA agreement, host nation support, and Japan's decision to suspend the SDF's Indian Ocean refueling missions.
Amazingly, the U.S. delegation even told the DJP that they had a better understanding of Japan’s defense needs than the Japanese themselves, particularly vis-à-vis China.
[US officials] elaborated that there might be contingencies related not just to Situations in Areas Surrounding Japan (SIASJ), but also to the defense of Japan itself…[They] also related this issue back to realignment, noting that the redeployment of Marines in their entirety to Guam would not give the U.S. military the flexibility and speed necessary to meet its Security Treaty obligations to Japan,
The WikiLeaks cables show that Campbell went so far as to tell DPJ officials that their demands on the secret agreements on nuclear weapons could “create a situation that would require the US to respond in a way unhelpful to the alliance.” That was a blatant threat to Hatoyama to cancel the US-Japan alliance if he continued his ways.
In our interview in 2008, Hatoyama recalled that Flournoy and Campbell only made their demands to his subordinates, not to him as prime minister. “Obama never requested me directly,” he said. Instead, in a few brief meetings with the US president, Obama told him that any conclusions would be drawn from a US-Japan task force of diplomats and military officials created to deal with outstanding bilateral issues. And that’s what he regrets “the most,” he recalled.
Here’s why. When the DPJ shocked the US government by taking power in 2009, Hatoyama tried valiantly to wrestle control of the state from Japan’s powerful bureaucrats, who traditionally remain in place for years and often retire to take lucrative jobs in the industries they are supposed to oversee. “We said this would be a politician-led administration,” he recalled. “That upset the bureaucrats, not only for this issue but for all others as well.”
That can be seen in their response to the DPJ’s security proposals. In an extraordinary admission, Hatoyama essentially blamed the bureaucrats for spiking his attempts to redefine the US-Japanese alliance. “In reality, LDP administrations were really moved by bureaucrats, who were the real operators,” Hatoyama said. “They were always trying to please the US, trying to guess what they wanted and acting proactively on that.” (italics mine).
One of their tactics, he said, included providing a “fake paper” to him about the strategic importance of the proposed new US base in Henoko; it supposedly claimed that all US bases had to be within 60 nautical miles of sites where the US military stages exercises. But when he as prime minister formally asked the Pentagon if it had a rule like that, “they said no,” he said. “So what they did was submit a fake paper to a prime minister. And I don’t think it was done by the US at all—it was the bureaucrats, to please the US.”
In other words, his own government bureaucrats deliberately lied to him to keep the US military happy. For that reason, “I shouldn’t have gone along” with Obama’s proposals to leave their discussions to the US-Japan task force, Hatoyama said.
Hatoyama was pushed out after his government acceded to the US demand for the new base at Henoko in 2010, and the DPJ was later disbanded. Henoko is currently being expanded to include new runways that jut into a once-protected natural waterway. But it, too, has been the focus of daily protests and remains a key unresolved issue between Washington and Tokyo. As I recall on my Patreon, I travelled to the islands in 2023, visited the Henoko protests, and interviewed Okinawa's vice governor about the situation.
Abe to the rescue
To the glee of the Obama administration, Hatoyama was replaced in 2012 by the LDP's Shinzo Abe, whose grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was judged by the US occupation as a war criminal for his role as Minister of Commerce in the Tojo cabinet that declared war on America in 1941. He turned the tables on Hatoyama, declared that moving the Futenma base to Henoko was the "only alternative" for Okinawa, and became the the longest-ruling leaders in Japan’s postwar history.
After Abe was assassinated on July 8, 2022, exactly three years ago today, he and his ruling LDP party were praised relentlessly by the U.S. political establishment in Washington. “A champion of the Alliance between our nations and the friendship between our people,” declared President Joe Biden, who immediately ordered that flags on federal buildings be flown at half mast – a rare step of respect for a fallen foreign leader.
David Sanger, the well-connected national security reporter for the New York Times, called Abe “the most transformational politician in Japan’s postwar World War II history.” By “reinterpreting” Japan’s US-imposed peace constitution, he said, Abe committed Japan for the first time to the “collective defense” of its Pacific allies.
One of the most grotesque statements about Abe came from Hillary Clinton, who is still considered by many liberals to be the reigning queen of American feminism.
Apparently non-plussed over Abe’s stubborn refusal to apologize for Japan’s wartime kidnapping of thousands of Korean sex slaves known as "comfort women," Clinton mourned Abe as a “firm believer that no economy, society, or country can achieve its full potential if women are left behind.” Abe, who always insisted that the comfort women were willing prostitutes serving the empire, must have had a few laughs over that from his special place in hell.
Over in MAGA country, where only the manly men survive, Abe was viewed as the world’s most successful nationalist and known as the “Trump before Trump.” From the cult’s leader on down the chain, the praise was thick. “Really BAD NEWS FOR THE WORLD," Trump virtually shouted on his account at Truth Social after hearing of Abe's death. He fondly remembered him as the first foreign leader to meet with him as president and a frequent visitor to Mar-A-Lago. Abe “will be greatly missed,” he added.
As the AP reported, Abe was among the few world leaders who developed a bond with Trump during his first term as president. "The two men built their rapport over rounds of golf and dinners with their wives at Trump's Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago. During Trump’s 2019 state visit to Japan, Abe took Trump to a sumo wrestling match and arranged for him to be the first leader to meet with Japan’s newly enthroned emperor."
A month before his inauguration in January 2025, Trump entertained Abe's widow at Mar-A-Lago. And in his first meeting with PM Ishiba at the White House, he praised Abe to the skies. “Shinzo was a great friend of mine,” Trump told the Japanese leader. “I couldn’t have felt worse when that happened to him at a horrible event. But he also was a friend of yours, and he had tremendous respect for you.” Trump really does relish his role as the “daddy” of MAGA World.
Trump can’t even remember Ishida’s name
But none of Trump’s words were true. Even as an LDP candidate running for prime minister, Ishiba tried hard to distance himself from Abe, who is extremely unpopular in Japan for his corrupt dealings with the neo-fascist Unification Church. Ishiba has also delicately but firmly urged his country to alter the SOFA agreement Hatoyama criticized. Moreover, Abe's faction in the LDP, one its largest, was recently disbanded after a 46-year reign over Japanese politics.
In his recent dealings with Ishiba, Trump has shown nothing but contempt for a Japan without Abe. At the recent NATO summit, he justified his attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities by comparing them - triumphantly - to President Truman's horrific atomic bombings of Japan in August 1945. "I don't want to use an example of Hiroshima," he said. "I don't want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war."
The statement outraged many Japanese. "Could President Trump not imagine how his words would hurt the feelings of A-bomb survivors?" asked the Mainichi newspaper. "The atomic bombings are not past tragedies that the American president should reference lightly."
Last week, during a Fox interview when he complained how "spoiled" Japan was with respect to the United States, Trump even forgot Ishiba's name. Boasting that he has no plans to roll back his auto tariffs, Trump said he will soon be sending letters to Asian leaders. "I could send one (letter) to Japan: 'Dear Mr. Japan, here's the story. You're going to pay a 25 percent tariff on your cars." That was apparently the gist of the letter he sent on Monday (Ishiba called the decision “truly regrettable.”)
Trump's nostalgia for Abe would come as no surprise to Hatoyama, who told me that he was trying to distance Japan from the militarized country it had become under the now-dead US supplicant.
Abe’s eagerness to cooperate with the US military, he argued, was part of his dream to transform Japan into a full-fledged military power. “He has sort of a ridiculous ambition to say that ‘I made a strong country,’” he said in 2018. The same is true of Abe’s drive to convince Japan to get rid of Article 9 of its constitution, which bans Japan from taking part in military operations outside of its shores - and is still technically in force.
"My definition of a strong politician is not some who can create a military power," Hatoyama told me. "It's someone who can create an environment where you can work cooperatively, together with neighboring countries." That is exactly what Japan desperately needs now. And this time, the LDP and Japanese voters may be listening.
On July 3rd, campaigning officially began for an Upper House election on July 20th that, according to Asahi, “could further upend the power structure in Japanese politics.” I’m sure Hatoyama will be watching closely to see if his vision of a new Japan prevails. 🌺
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