"I do not expect any operational impact whatsoever," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell assured on Japan's suspension of a six-year refueling mission in the Indian Ocean. Whatever the accuracy of that, international consequences were so mild that one wouldn't have known without picking up a Japanese newspaper. But this is big, or at least bigger, in Japan.
October 31st was the last day of Tokyo's authorization of supply duties. There wasn't a renewal, so the tanker Tokiwa and destroyer escort Kirisame are now homebound for Nagasaki. Entreaty from the Liberal Democratic Party government, in the form of a bill, went out to the legislature in that last fortnight. Unfortunately, the Diet is split. The sponsorial LDP has the lower House of Representatives, and the critical Democratic Party of Japan snatched the upper House of Councillors in a July 30th shellacking. No mandate, no flotilla.
Former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, the man and the politician, had to have militated for recent fortunes of the LDP more than any leadership or platform of the country's almost-uninterrupted majority party. Koizumi ended his term in near-weightlessness. He could count support of the people; promised reforms enacted; enlarged national profile; and momentum towards altering the pacifist constitution taken as part of Japan's 1945 surrender, public realization of dragging a ball and chain long after a sentence served. No amendments have been made since then. Only wordplay on the law's current language has allowed the LDP to claim basic military prerogatives, though under Koizumi, this worked.
In April, further preparations for a rewrite were made by the last prime minister, Shinzo Abe, who didn't last twelve months. Cabinet scandal begot suicide begot scandal; then the elections in July. Insisting that his polices were "not mistaken," Abe called the LDP's loss "no reason to flee." Six weeks later, Abe fled. Instructed by history, LDP prepotence isn't endangered by the DPJ, but the opposition party appears ready to strike out policies breaking Japan's geopolitical chastity, its first try recalling the Tokiwa and Kirisame.
A successor LDP government wants a compromise to get those ships heading back west, while it deals with the quibble of whether fuel went into ships defending civil liberty of Iraqis rather than that of Afghans. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is in Tokyo this week, and he wouldn't have solicited more involvement abroad if it weren't possible. Japan, to onlookers somnambulant, keeps putting one foot ahead of the other, somehow, staggering in the generally right direction.