Ji m Webb
The Honorable Jim Webb is a member of the US Senate representing the State ofVirginia. He serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East
Asian and Pacific Affairs and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee
on Personnel. The following is the text of his keynote address.

Thank you very much, Ichiro [Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki—Ed.]. The otherIchiro. He does not wear “51” [like the Seattle Mariners’ Ichiro Suzuki—Ed.], but
he is just as valuable to Japan and the United States. Ambassador Fujisaki is agreat representative of Japan in the United States. He mentioned that he travels
all around the United States to express his opinions about American-Japaneserelationships. He did indeed come to my family home in the Appalachian
Mountains, which is a very rural area—mostly tobacco farmers and coal miners.
I told Ichiro when he and his wife Yoriko visited Alley Hollow, which is a mountain area where my family came from, that he was the highest-ranking foreign
diplomat ever to visit Alley Hallow. In fact, he was the only foreign diplomat
who ever visited Alley Hollow.
Let me express my appreciation to Tadashi Yamamoto for having put thisconference together. I am very pleased to be able to spend time with you today.
It is remarkable when you think that 80 percent of Americans like the Japanese;that is a very good signal for the future of our relationship and a good starting
point for what I have to say to you today.
I was very grateful for the invitation when the Ambassador called me on behalfof Mr. Yamamoto and asked if I would participate in this conference. He indicatedto me how important this was from the viewpoint of the Japanese government interms of trying to get people together to reinvigorate the notion of the relationship between our two countries. This has been a great opportunity for me today
to listen to the frankly expressed viewpoints of people from across the spectrumof ideas.
I come here as a friend of Japan, who strongly believes that the future stabilityof the Asia Pacific region depends on this alliance because of the balance thisbilateral relationship brings. This relationship affects other countries throughthe moral authority that comes from the shared views of openness, society, andJ i m we b b

vigorous economic interaction, as well as the stability in security terms that itbrings to the region.
I have had the privilege of being involved with Japan for now 42 years, since
I first came to Okinawa during the Vietnam War as a Marine. One comment I
think is appropriate given the recommendation of Mr. Kono earlier that more
people in the United States of Japanese descent should become involved in theseissues. As you could hear from the opening comments of Representative DeGette,echoed by Representative Davis, there is a wellspring of support for this relationship from the millions of American veterans who have had the opportunity tocome to this country, to interact with its people, and to understand the stabilityof this society and the positive ways that the Japanese people treat themselves.
I have often said that in terms of domestic society Japan is the fairest societythat I have come across. I was here after I left the Marine Corps, working for thegovernor of Guam. Ironically, I did a paper in the mid-1970s as a military planneron the basing system in the Pacific, which was the basis for the first book thatI wrote. I visited Japan looking at the training areas at the bases in Okinawa. Iwrote this paper in 1974, and a good bit of what I wrote is actually happening atthe moment.
I had the interesting experience almost exactly a year ago of coming to Tokyo
and Okinawa, looking at the recommendations of the military, visiting with theOkinawan leaders, and then returning to Guam, Tinian, and Saipan—where I had
spent a good bit of time in the 1970s—and examining the very difficult mechanical process of having to put this relocation into place.
I have visited this country many times as a novelist and as a journalist. I wastold in 1983 that I was the first American journalist ever allowed inside Japan’s
prison system. I spent a month visiting prisons, meeting with people from theMinistry of Justice and also interviewing people in the United States about how
the Japanese prison system works. Bottom line: fair, hard, well-administered.
I took that experience back with me. One of the key issues that I have been
involved with in the United States Senate has been reforming the American
criminal justice system, and I have often commented about the way the Japanesecriminal justice system works.
I was here as Secretary of the Navy. Earlier I believe Mr. Hitoshi Tanaka
mentioned the COCOM Toshiba incident. We were the principal negotiators
when I was Secretary of the Navy on examining the implications of that incident.
I was here in 1998 when Korea fired its first long-range missile. It was very interesting to see the reaction in this country when that happened. I was here on ajournalistic assignment in 2002 when it was revealed that North Korea possessed
nuclear weapons.
The Ambassador mentioned my Senate campaign in 2006. In the final debatethat I had with my opponent, we were each allowed one question to ask the otherperson. I asked my opponent what he thought we should do about the Senkaku
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Islands. It was a fair question—he was on the Foreign Relations Committee. Itwas very interesting to watch the media section behind the crowd with all thejournalists checking Google, putting in “Senkaku….where is Senkaku?”
The reason I took some time to lay all that out is that I have had the good
fortune over the years of observing the evolution of the relationship between ourtwo countries. The question really is, “What has this journey been since WorldWar II, and how do we proceed together?”
I would begin with the premise that Northeast Asia is the only place in theworld where the interests of Russia, China, and Japan directly intersect. We tend
to forget when we look at history that these balances can be very volatile when
one of those three countries assumes that it has more power and becomes moredaring than the other two. The great benefit of the United States–Japan relationship is that, since World War II, we have added a fourth component to this intersection, and that is the United States being vigorously involved in this part ofthis world and doing so in an alliance with Japan. This has not been perfect. At
that time there was a lot of turbulence in the region, but the United States’ relationship with Japan has brought about the kind of stability that has allowed thisregion to prosper.
When I was here in 1969, the United States was fighting a war with Vietnam—awar that cost us 58,000 dead—in which the Soviet Union was playing a very heavy
hand. We had recently lost nearly 40,000 dead in the Korean War, mostly fighting
the Chinese. Japan in 1969 was rebuilding physically, emotionally, and economically, and the Soviet Union was expansionist, as we saw later in Vietnam. China
was consolidating its power internally and externally and making a good bit ofnoise about the situation in Taiwan. From the United States’ perspective, China
was behind what we called the “bamboo curtain”; we did not have a great deal of
information about what was going on.
By the 1980s, when I was in the Pentagon, we had seen instability in the region
because of the fall of Vietnam, which was creating a lot of questions about
whether the United States was committed to remaining in the region. We tend toforget—and we have not mentioned it a great deal in the discussions today—thatby the 1980s, the Soviet Union had made a major push in East Asia. The principal
focus of the United States during the Cold War was an expansionist Soviet Union.
In this part of the world, the Soviet Union had 600 naval combatants. It had
gained warm water ports in the Pacific for the first time in history at Cam Ranh
Bay in Vietnam. When I was Secretary of the Navy, on any given day there wereover 25 Soviet combatants at Cam Ranh Bay.
China at that point became a major beneficiary of a shift in the United States’
strategy as a counterpoint to what we were perceiving as an expansionist Soviet
Union. This caused the United States some difficulties, which we are still working
to overcome. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States had become
overexposed and unprepared for the way that China would begin expanding. This26

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has had a dramatic effect on our economy, and on an incremental basis it has
affected regional stability. This is another reason why it is so important that any
adjustment to military bases or any questions about the relationship between theUnited States and Japan be handled very carefully so as not to create the wrong
impressions in terms of regional stability.
After 9/11 the United States basically lost its focus on East Asia. We became
obsessed with Iraq and Afghanistan. I can say from my time in the Senate that it iseven true today. You can only handle so many issues in one day. When Americans
were talking foreign policy, they were talking about Iraq and Afghanistan. Whenthey were talking about Asia, generally they were talking about the evolving relationship with China.
The past few years have seen a healthy readjustment to that tendency, both fromthe perspective of the United States and also from the perspective of countries in
the region. I have spent a great deal of time in the Senate reinforcing in East Asia,
Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia the intention of the United States to remaininvolved in this part of the world, not simply in terms of security but in termsof our economy, our cultural ties, and the vital importance of the United Statesremaining part of the formula in East and Southeast Asia in order to provide
stability so that these economies can grow.
It has been almost one year to the day since I was last visiting Tokyo andOkinawa. There have been a series of issues over the past year that have provided
a clarity in terms of what our challenges are and why we need to remain together
in terms of our alliance: the Cheonan incident that happened in March of lastyear, other incidents that have increased the tensions in the Koreas, the surprisingly violent protests in Thailand—surprising for me as someone who has beenin and out of Thailand for more than 30 years—and the absence of clear reassurances from the Chinese government when they have been asked to join us inproviding a steady hand in incidents that involve Korea, Iran, and even Burma,
where I have spent time over a number of years. So it is extremely importantfor Japan and the United States to work to maintain a strategic stability in thisregion and also for us to take advantage of the willingness of South Korea tojoin in this effort.
It is important for us to work with the ASEAN countries, particularly togrow our relations with Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and—something that I have been working on for a good bit of time—to resolve thesituation in Burma in a way that would keep that country from falling ever further
under Chinese economic and military dominance.
We have a wide range of sovereignty issues that the United States and Japan
can work together to resolve. We hear the comment many times that sovereignty
issues should only be dealt with on a bilateral basis. The reality is that there are a
lot of sovereignty issues that are incapable of being dealt with on a bilateral basis
when one country has far more power than another country that is protesting the27T h e N e w S h i m o d a C o n f e r e nc esovereignty issues. This is particularly true, although not exclusively true, withChina in the South China Sea and East China Sea. The Senkakus were a wake-up
call for a lot of people, the Spratly Islands are claimed by five nations, and theParacels are claimed by China and Vietnam.
Here is something that I think the United States and Japan need to think about
in terms of how we can work collectively together with respect to sovereignty
issues: the Mekong River Delta. This does not get enough attention, but approximately 70 million people in the Lower Mekong right now have been put at risk
environmentally and in terms of a whole range of economic and way-of-life issues
by a series of dams that have been put on the Mekong River beginning in China
and going down into Southeast Asia. China is the only country in that region andone of the few countries in the world that does not recognize downstream waterrights in situations like this where rivers cross international boundaries. I havemade a recommendation in the United States Senate that lending institutions
such as the Asian Development Bank put in environmental requirements before
they fund any more of these hydroelectric dams on the Mekong River. It is a very
serious situation in the Lower Mekong.
The bottom line looking to the future is that history shows us what happens
when this region loses its stability. This is one of the most volatile regions in theworld, and history also reminds us, particularly since the end of World War II,
that if the United States and Japan stand together, this region is going to remain
the economic flagship of the world.
Strategic security for me is kind of like birth control: the more precautions you
take, the less chance of an incident. You can apply that to this region, which is oneof the reasons we must remain close together.

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