Japanese Opinion on Key Foreign Policy Issues

Abstract

The year 1970 promises to be a crucial one in Japanese-American relations. The revised US-Japan Security Treaty, which occasioned so much domestic turmoil when the Kishi cabinet forced its ratification in 1960, can be renounced by either party in June 1970. Prime Minister Sato Eisaku, after his reelection as LDP president in late 1968, announced that he would seek an American promise on the date of Okinawan reversion as the major objective of his final two years in office. Meanwhile, in the first public election for Okinawan governor (technically known as the Chief Executive of the Ryukyu Islands), the opposition candidate defeated his conservative opponent, who urged a more moderate policy on reversion. The Nixon administration, facing the immediate problems of ending the war in Vietnam, preventing a major war in the Middle East, and repairing the NATO alliance, must also give careful attention to relations with Japan, its major Pacific ally and the third industrial power in the world. Japanese public opinion may not exert decisive influence on the Sato regime's foreign policy, but the political system in Japan assures 'greater democratic controls than in most nations of the Afro-Asian world-thanks largely to the postwar reforms of the American-directed Occupation. As former Ambassador to Japan, Edwin Reischauer, wrote in 1961: In a democracy ... government decisions will on the whole mirror public opinion. ... Foreign policy problems are, on the whole, the great divisive issues in Japan today, and most of them closely concern the United States in one way or another.' Today, as this report of a December 1968 national survey will demonstrate, public opinion does not support many of the key foreign policies of the Sato government. Beyond the often misleading statements of Tokyo officials or the violent protest demonstrations against official policy, we should understand how the average Japanese voter looks at the Security Treaty, American bases in Japan and Okinawa, the China policy, and the Vietnam conflict. Using scientific opinion surveys conducted by the writer and others to probe Japanese opinion on foreign policy questions, this article tries to explain both the foreign policy preferences of various segments of the Japanese public and their probable impact on future policy. The writer has conducted four surveys of Japanese foreign policy attitudes (in 1958, 1963, 1966, and 1968), and since 1953 has studied the