Japan: Goaded by North Korea and backed by the US, Japan is in the midst of a profound military realignment, writes David McNeill in Tokyo
Since North Korea lobbed seven missiles into the Sea of Japan last week, a small army of commentators has taken to the Japanese airwaves to explain this latest provocation from the reclusive Stalinist state.
Are the tests an attempt to force the US back to the negotiating table, an impotent stunt by a desperate military dictatorship or a curtain-raiser to war? Nobody knows, but on one point all agree: the missiles have quickened the pace of a sea-change in Tokyo's military affairs.
Japan is in the midst of its most far-reaching military realignment since the second World War. The Asian superpower will soon have the status long demanded by conservatives: that of a "normal" country, finally giving it the military clout to match its economic muscle.
But at what cost?
For more than half a century, this string of islands has been America's "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the Pacific; a largely silent partner in a strategic alliance with the US that kept Japanese military spending at 1 per cent of GDP, while driving a wedge between Tokyo, Beijing and Pyongyang.
Since the end of the Cold War, Japan has faced two choices: abandon this alliance, begin dismantling the dozens of US bases on its soil, and mend political fences with its Asian neighbours, particularly fast-rising China; or deepen ties with Washington.
Any doubts about which road Japan has taken have been decisively settled by prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who has sunk Tokyo's ties with China to a 30-year low while moving his country closer to the US than any previous Japanese leader.
The "special relationship" between Mr Koizumi and President George W Bush rivals, for some, the great strategic partnerships of the past such as Ronald Reagan's transatlantic political love affair with Margaret Thatcher.
But behind the photo-ops in Graceland and a shared passion among both leaders for baseball and Elvis Presley lies cold political calculation. The US wants Japan to shoulder more of the cost of its enormously expensive military operations in Asia; to become, in the parlance of neo-conservative Washington, the "Britain of the Far East".
Mr Koizumi and others in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, for their part, believe the deepening military alliance with Washington is needed to counter the growing menace from Pyongyang, and ultimately from China, which continues to rearm, largely in response to the perceived threat from Japan and the US.
Conservatives in Mr Koizumi's government also hope to dismantle what they consider the ultimate emblem of the neutered post-war Japanese state: Article 9 of the 1947 constitution, the so-called "pacifist clause" written during the US occupation and which forever renounces war.
Tokyo has already bet heavily on its US partnership, pledging one trillion yen on the as-yet-unproven missile shield project, and agreeing to jointly develop, for the first time, interceptor missiles to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The North Korean tests prompted Tokyo's defence chief Fukushiro Nukaga to tell the Diet (Japan's parliament) last week that Japan should put the joint US-missile shield into operation "as soon as possible". "We cannot sit idly by," he warned.
Late last month the US said it will base Patriot interceptor missiles in Japan, an announcement that follows the decision to strengthen joint air defences and permanently deploy a nuclear aircraft carrier in a port southwest of Tokyo.
The most obvious sign, however, of the transformation in the US-Japan relationship is the plan to transfer the core operations of the US army's First Corps headquarters from Washington State to a base near Yokohama, a move that effectively makes Japan a partner in America's global military strategy.
All this deeply worries some in this pacifist country where hosting nuclear warships and building missiles has been taboo for 60 years.
The planned aircraft carrier deployment, for example, has provoked a furious response, and 500,000 opposition signatures from local residents near the host port. Many are angry that Mr Koizumi has, in the words of Asahi newspaper editor Yoshibumi Wakamiya, "recklessly incorporated Japan into US military strategy".
North Korea, China, Russia and even South Korea are also increasingly unhappy with the strengthening US alliance, and with Japan's growing assertiveness in the region, where Tokyo is currently embroiled in territorial disputes with all four of its nearest neighbours. Such is the price Japan must pay for standing up in an increasingly dangerous world, say its conservatives.
More missiles from North Korea into the Japan Sea could have an even more destabilising impact on this long-sleeping military bear, goading the government into breaking the ultimate taboo: developing nuclear weapons. That would be a hard sell, even for Mr Koizumi, in the only country to have suffered a nuclear attack. But it is a measure of the enormous distance Japan has travelled since 1990 that such an option is no longer unthinkable.