At the centenary of Japan's Annexation of the Korean Empire in August 2010, speculation centered on whether Japan could achieve a radical departure from its traditional foreign policy of ‘Datsu-A Nyu-Ou’, namely leaving Asia to become a Western style country. This policy, resulted in Japan's colonization of Korea in August 1910 and led further to the invasion of China and other Asian nations, ending in Japan's utter defeat in August 1945.

On August 31, President Obama delivered a speech from the White House. Because he was expected to declare the end of the Iraqi war, the entire nation focused its attention on the content to the speech. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom is over. … We have spent over a trillion dollars on this war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.… Our most urgent task is to restore our economy, and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work’. It marked the beginning of a new era, and under other circumstances this speech would have impressed people. The president, however looked troubled, and the atmosphere was gloomy – hardly the context for a forward-looking policy announcement; this was largely due to the severity of the economic crisis the US currently faces.

While most Japanese newspapers led with the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on the morning of February 13, it was different in Okinawa. Both Okinawan dailies, Ryukyu Shimpo and Okinawa Taimusu, ran as their top story, “Deterrence was [just] a Pretext,” (Yokushiryoku wa hoben). In a joint interview held in Tokyo on January 31 and February 8 with the two Okinawan papers and the Kyodo News Agency, former Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio conceded that he had just given “deterrence” as the factor necessitating retention of the US Marine Corps on Okinawa (and hence the building of a new Okinawa base for them) because he needed a pretext. Nine months after stepping down as Prime Minister, he conceded that this was not true. Since then, Hatoyama has scarcely stopped talking, even giving an interview to a Hong Kong TV station, and in the process he has shed vivid light on Japanese policymaking and the US-Japan-Okinawa relationship. Japan scarcely needs a Wikileaks when it has a Hatoyama.