More on the US-Japanese Alliance

Tokyo - This morning's International Herald Tribune/Asahi Shimbun ran a very good story by Martin Fackler on US-Japanese relations.  It comports with what I've been learning/hearing from my many meetings here.  It begins:

Two months after taking power, Japan’s new leadership is still raising alarms in the United States with its continued scrutiny of the countries’ more than half-century-old security alliance. But this reconsideration is not a pulling away from the United States so much as part of a broader, mostly domestic effort to outgrow Japan’s failed postwar order, say political experts here.

More important, the analysts say, these stirrings may also be the first signs of something that both Tokyo and Washington should have had years ago: a more open dialogue on a security relationship that has failed to keep up with the changing realities in Japan and, more broadly, in Asia.

Read here for more.