Japan’s Hard-Line Prime Minister Takaichi Faces Crucial Test With Plan To Withdraw U.S. Marines from Okinawa

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, riding a wave of popularity after the resounding success of her ruling party at the polls over the weekend, faces an immediate test of her commitment to the American alliance and her willingness to stand up to China and North Korea. Should she reverse the exodus of American marines from the southernmost prefecture of Okinawa and ask the marines to stay where they’ve been since defeating the Japanese on Okinawa in the hardest fought battle of World War II in Asia in 1945? Ms. Takaichi and her ministers are having to consider that question as American military experts urge a halt to plans to send 5,000 marines on Okinawa to the American territory of Guam, 1,400 miles southeast in the south Pacific. “The Marine Corps presence in Okinawa is critical to deterring China and North Korea,” says a report by the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that often makes recommendations to the Pentagon. “This move comes at a time when China is accelerating its bid for dominance in the Western Pacific.” The report, written by a marine corps officer at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center, Caleb Eames, and an assistant director of the center, Amy Cowley, says the move, in the works for 30 years, “undermines deterrence by pulling critical rapid-response forces from the First Island Chain” — the island nations, from Japan to the Philippines, that form a bulwark against Communist Chinese expansionism.In between Japan and the Philippines is the island democracy of Taiwan, constantly harassed by Chinese ships and planes as China’s President Xi Jinping threatens to bring it under mainland control. Ms. Takaichi has incurred Beijing’s wrath by stating that an attack on Taiwan would threaten Japan’s survival, implying Japan would join in the island’s defense.While Okinawa residents have been protesting for years against American forces in their midst, the report fortifies the view of senior marine officers that the plan to relocate marines elsewhere is ill-advised. The commandant of the marine corps, General Eric Smith, has told reporters covering the Pentagon that the move “puts us going the wrong way,” according to the website Military.com.“Guam puts us on the other side of the International Date Line,” General Smith was quoted as saying. “It puts us a long way from the crisis theater, from the priority theater.”General Smith views China with deep suspicion at a time when President Trump, tamping down tensions between Washington and Beijing, is planning to see President Xi in Beijing in April.“Every time you give China a foot, they take a mile,” Military.com reported him as saying. “They only understand one thing, which is a credible deterrent force. And that credible deterrent force has to be present to win, which — to me — means being [in] the first island chain.”Those fighting words present a challenge to Ms. Takaichi, who has won a reputation as an arch-conservative, calling for Japan to spend at least two percent of its gross domestic product on defense and to loosen the constraints of Article Nine of its post-war constitution barring Japanese forces from going to war overseas.She has not commented specifically on American forces on Okinawa, where 18,000 marines and their families form the crux of America’s ground troops in the Pacific. So far, only about 100 of them have gone to Guam in what a military spokesman called “the first phase of relocating marines to locations outside Japan.” The Marines, besides going to Guam, may be dispersed as far apart as Hawaii and Australia.Ms. Takaichi has yet to address the controversy surrounding American forces on Okinawa, including America’s largest air base in Asia at Kadena in the center of the island. The marines and air force comprise the majority of America’s 52,000 troops in Japan, nearly twice as many as the 28,500 American troops stationed in America’s other northeast Asia ally, South Korea.The Atlantic Council report indicates, however, that the Japanese are sensitive to the realities even if reluctant to speak out on Okinawa. “The Japanese government understands the need to continue to bolster defenses in the First Island Chain,” said the report. “In 2024, the Japan Air Self-Defense Force scrambled its jets 464 times in response to Chinese incursions, mostly around southern islands, underlining a clear need for enhanced military response capability.”“If done right,” said the report, “reworking the overall laydown of forces in Okinawa could result in more efficient and advantageous basing options for both the Japan Self-Defense Forces and the United States” — an issue that Ms. Takaichi may have to address when she meets Mr. Trump in Washington next month.

Japan’s Hard-Line Prime Minister Takaichi Faces Crucial Test With Plan To Withdraw U.S. Marines from Okinawa

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