As America's Peak Millennials Rise, Postwar Japan-US Relations Will Break Down from the American Side

As I wrote last week, the United States is nearing a structural turning point, and the chances are rising that its aftershocks will shake Japan hard. How will the distorted relationship between Japan and the United States, built up steadily since the end of the war, change from here? Its future bears directly on our own lives, so this week I want to look at the near future now bearing down on us.

Start with demographics. Japan, South Korea, China, Europe, and the United Kingdom cannot escape falling birth rates and aging populations, yet among developed countries the United States alone has not fallen into that trap. It is the only developed nation with an abundant supply of so-called Millennials and Generation Z, and in the presidential elections of 2028 and 2032, the majority of its electorate will turn over.

The United States, which has reigned as a vast empire since the war, is now unmistakably beginning to change, and the aftershocks will be felt across the world. What deserves attention here is that the majorities sustaining the two great parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are turning into what we might call the “old Americans” of the anti-communist era. That type will shift dramatically once Millennials and Gen Z, who grew up with no memory of anti-communism, become the majority.

The largest single cohort in America, across every generation, is people born in 1990–1991, as I was. Known in the United States as the “Peak Millennials,” this generation has clearly begun to find its voice.

Naturally, they do not all speak with one voice. Because they have no ties to evangelical Christianity, which has long sustained the old Americans, or to any strong ideology, they stand out for holding values and positions that differ from one person to the next. Broadly, though, they oppose imperial interference in the internal affairs of other countries and believe that America’s own problems must come first. Put simply, when life at home is not holding together, toppling foreign governments and waging wars is foolish. I believe that once these “new Americans” arrive, the existing relationship between Japan and the United States is likely to collapse, and the collapse will come from a change in America.

That is where the strain appears. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which built a de facto one-party state after the war, needs an imagined enemy at any cost to defuse the public’s present discontent with its rule, and it hopes to hold on to power by provoking other countries, and at times by going to war, as a way of managing what the people say and do. Yet the LDP has survived this long only because it could take a free ride on American security. The LDP, in other words, was useful to the United States. That free ride worked because Japan also had value to America as a bulwark against communism, which made the arrangement a partnership in complicity. Today, though, it is an old story from the old Americans’ world.

When generational change comes to America, the world the old Americans built, which the new Americans find an eyesore, will survive intact in Japan’s super-aged society. The crucial point is that Japan, where no such generational change will occur, will go on demanding the relationship on the same old terms. To a new generation of leaders who never knew the old system of Japan-US relations and hold no stake in it, this will look like something rotten that ought to be dismantled. A decisive rift could also open with a future Japanese government that pushes militarization and stokes tension with its imagined enemies.

So the minimum we can predict about the near future we are going to live through comes down to this. Over a span of roughly eight years, Japan will not change, but the United States, Japan’s master, certainly will.

Another thing we cannot overlook is that the transition is likely to plunge America into civil war, which will inevitably weaken its involvement in the rest of the world. Part of this is already coming to light. In reaction, anti-American feeling, or simple dislike of America, will rise within Japan.

The signs appear in the results of a large global survey released last week, on July 15, by the American research organization Pew Research Center. According to the report, views of China were more favorable than views of the United States in 25 of the 36 countries surveyed. It is the first time since the survey began in 2002 that China has outranked the United States in so many countries, and in many of them, Chinese President Xi Jinping drew more confidence than US President Donald Trump to “do the right thing regarding world affairs.”

The report also noted that the United States remained more popular than China in six countries, namely Japan, India, South Korea, the Philippines, Poland, and Israel. What must not be missed is that Japan registered as one of the countries with the lowest favorability toward China. This should be read as the result that most faithfully reflects the wishes of the United States, which treats China as its imagined enemy. In other words, Japan has failed to respond to a new current in which countries around the world place more trust in China than in America, and this absolute isolation will prove fatal to Japan in the years ahead.

At the same time, it is also true that this current has its uses for a third political force outside the LDP. Postwar history can, after all, be read as the story of America stripping Japan of its sovereignty and forcing it into subordination for American benefit. Of course, that is a one-sided Japanese reading. But for a third force seeking to rise by stoking anti-American sentiment and setting itself apart from the LDP, this approach is the most realistic and the most convenient. Since the LDP is synonymous with obedience to America, the simplest and most effective way to declare that one is different is to come out against America.

Over the next ten years, we will be living witnesses to a world without precedent. Sadly, Japan, which has no capacity to correct itself and has entered an era of extremely low birth rates and an extremely aged society, will not change. Yet we must also reckon with the fact that when America, Japan’s suzerain, changes, it is once again Japan where the effects will show most starkly.