When the DPJ won their landslide victory last year, I was quite sure that Hatoyama’s government would make alliance-related issues a priority. At the time, there was a lot of skepticism that Hatoyama would make much of an effort to follow through on his campaign rhetoic and try to change some aspects of Japan’s relationship with the U.S. The assumption was that a new, untested government staffed by a permanent opposition party confronting broad public discontent with domestic problems would not waste its time quarreling with the U.S. over bases on Okinawa. American observers seemed to assume that the most significant transition of power from one party to another in postwar Japanese history would have little or no effect on Japanese foreign policy. Perhaps they were too accustomed to our unfortunate bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, according to which virtually nothing ever changes despite changes in party control.

As it turned out, Hatoyama not only made it a priority, but he focused on the Futenma dispute so much and he made enough outlandish promises of what he would be able to accomplish in a very short time that he accelerated the disintegration of his ministry. Hatoyama and his cabinet were already laboring under the heavy burden of absurdly high expectations and unsustainably high approval ratings early on. The public was always going to sour on the DPJ once it had to start governing and making trade-offs. Even so, Hatoyama wasn’t necessarily doomed until his handling of the basing dispute blew up in his face.

If anything, I underestimated how important the basing issue was to a significant bloc of DPJ voters and also underestimated how responsive Hatoyama would be to their concerns. Having vowed to resign if he could not deliver a new basing deal by the end of May, he now faces a total loss of confidence. The DPJ government will continue on, but Hatoyama is now out of office. That’s unfortunate for Japan to the extent that it discourages political challenges to the status quo in government there, but it is also a missed opportunity for the U.S. As I wrote last August:

For Washington, change in Tokyo provides an opportunity to reevaluate the need for a large U.S. military presence in Japan. The U.S. presence has been a persistent source of tension and public anger in Japan. But it has also siphoned U.S. forces from areas of the world where they are needed far more. Sunday’s election may be the first step in redeploying those troops or bringing some of them home.

Clearly, I was far too hopeful that anyone in Washington would have the imagination or political courage to seize this opportunity. All that Hatoyama’s failure over Futenma means is that the tensions over basing and discontent with the alliance that helped fuel the DPJ’s rise to power will go unaddressed for many more years. The U.S. will have more difficulty in the future with Japan on account of our unwillingness to accommodate Japanese complaints this time.