JAPAN-CHINA-US

Junichiro Koizumi's election victory last weekend is being analyzed for what it means to future structural reform in Japan's economy. But the more interesting aspect of his landslide success has been neglected.

Koizumi's victory is a personal triumph amid a party and electoral system that for more than half a century has been dominated by profound institutional conservatism, party and governmental bureaucracies, and the suppression of political individualism and nonconforming leadership.

The casual but striking comparison that comes to mind is with Dominique de Villepin, France's new prime minister. Koizumi and Villepin share a certain intellectual eclecticism, a dramatic style, and conscious cultivation of glamour and evocation of emotion. Villepin is a wholly untried figure on the French political scene, while Koizumi has proven himself a brilliant and daring politician, but the resemblance is intriguing.

The question in Japan is whether Koizumi's victory will be exploited to change the stultified Japanese political system. It is noteworthy that when Japan changes, it often does so dramatically, collectively and radically - as in the Meiji Restoration, and again in 1945.

There are plenty of domestic changes waiting to be made, but possibly more important is that Japan's international situation and foreign policy are entering a period of tension, with threatened assumptions.

The geopolitics of the Far East have been frozen since the end of the Korean War, when the American strategic position in northern Asia was fixed by permanent strategic installation in military bases in Japan and South Korea. On the Allied side, nothing much has changed since then.

On China's side there has been a thaw since Mao Zedong's death in 1976 brought to power Communist Party figures intent on modernizing the country, while silently jettisoning ideology - a course that was affirmed in January 1979, when China establishing formal diplomatic relations with the United States.

Japan had no role in these events, other than as a passive American ally. South Korea has confronted the erratic and dangerous radicalism of the North Korean regime, but until very recently - when it set its own course in dealing with North Korea - it also remained an obedient and dependent ally of the United States.

Now two forces are at work to break down this East Asian geopolitical structure. The first is China's economic rise and its developing claim to be the great power of the region. Both claims have been given exaggerated credit in international opinion, and in American perceptions in particular.

The U.S. relationship to China now combines America's unpredictably dangerous financial dependence on Chinese purchases of its debt and a reciprocal Chinese economic dependence on trade with the United States.

At the same time, there is widespread fear in the United States that China poses a political and potential military challenge to American international primacy. This automatically affects Japan's politically isolated and dependent position as American ally.

Japan has its own deep problems with China, derived from World War II, but possessing much older and deeper roots in a rivalry that began in the 16th century, when Japan first tried to expand on the mainland at the expense of a weakened Chinese empire.

Japan's difficult relationship with China, however, has nothing to do with the American-Chinese rivalry. The latter is an unwanted complication for Japan, since it depends on the United States for security (even though its military establishment is one of the most significant in the world, and except in the nuclear sphere is much more sophisticated than that of China).

Japan has no interest in becoming involved in an American conflict with China, driven by alleged Chinese global ambitions and by right-wing figures in Washington convinced that war with China, over the exercise of hegemony in Asia, is probable.

One may think this latter the fantasy of a certain ideological fringe in the United States, but it possesses links to mainstream policy thinking about America's presumed necessary global role. What will come of this in the next few years will depend on many factors, with the fate of Iraq, and of the United States in Iraq, absolutely central to what occurs.

It is hard to believe that Japan will not find it essential to shift its own relations with the United States away from those that prevail today. Koizumi is resolutely committed to the American alliance, but he is also resolutely responsive to Japanese nationalism, an increasingly significant force. This has been demonstrated by his regular visits to the Yasukuni war memorial shrine - at considerable cost in good relations with China and South Korea.

Koizumi's election victory is a harbinger of change that is not likely to be limited to the Japanese economy.