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As Japan and the United States start talks on how to respond to armed incidents that
fall short of a full-scale attack on Japan, officials in Tokyo worry that their ally is
reluctant to send China a strong message of deterrence.
Military officials meet this week in Hawaii to review bilateral defense guidelines for
the first time in 17 years. Tokyo hopes to zero in on specific perceived threats, notably
China's claims to Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea, while Washington is emphasizing
broader discussions, officials on both sides say.
Washington takes no position on the sovereignty of the islands, called the Senkaku by Japan
and the Diaoyu by China, but recognizes that Japan administers them and says they fall
under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which obligates America to come to Japan's defense.
But even as Asia-Pacific security tensions mount, U.S. officials have made clear they
do not want to get pulled into a conflict between the world's second- and third-biggest
economies. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is
alarmed at China's rapid military buildup. Beijing in turn accuses Tokyo of being a regional
threat, citing Abe's more nationalist stance, his reversal of years of falling military
spending and his visit to a shrine that Asian countries see as glorifying Japan's wartime
past. "Japan wants to prioritize discussions on
China and clarify the respective U.S. and Japanese roles in the event of a 'grey zone'
incident," said a Japanese government official, referring to less than full-scale, systematic
military attacks backed by a state but still representing a threat to Japan's security.
Tokyo wants Washington to join in drafting scenarios for how the two allies would respond
in specific cases, he said. But Washington is worried about provoking
China by being too specific, say Japanese officials and experts.
"The United States is certainly ambivalent about this because they think it would drag
them into a confrontation and possibly a conflict with China," said Narushige Michishita, who
was a national security adviser to the government of Junichiro Koizumi from 2001-2006.
A U.S. defense official rejected the idea that Washington worries about antagonizing
China but stressed that the guideline review is a broad exercise, including the Korean
peninsula and global contingencies. "There is a tendency to distil all this back
to the Senkaku islands," the official said. "It's not about any particular contingency.
It's about making the U.S.-Japan alliance more flexible and responsive to a security
environment that's not as black and white as we were thinking about in 1997."
Singling out China, the official said, is "too simplistic a narrative".