Obama faces strains in Japan, first stop in Asia

By Caren Bohan and Linda Sieg

TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama headed into talks with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama on Friday in which he will likely try to smooth strained ties as the allies adjust to a rising China.

The two leaders greeted each other warmly in the lobby of Hatoyama's official residence ahead of their summit.

Tokyo is the first stop in a nine-day Asian tour that takes Obama to Singapore for an Asia-Pacific summit, to China for talks on climate change and trade imbalances, and to South Korea, where Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions will be in focus.

Washington's relations with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama's government, which has promised to oversee a diplomatic course less dependent on its long-time ally and forge closer ties with Asia, are frayed by a dispute over a U.S. military base.

Obama and Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party defeated its long-dominant rival in an August election, were expected to turn down the heat in the row over the U.S. Marines' Futenma air base on southern Okinawa island. The base is a key part of a realignment of the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan.

"I want to make this a summit that shows the importance of Japan-U.S. relations in a global context," Hatoyama told reporters on Friday morning ahead of Obama's arrival.

Assuaging anxiety and beginning to define a new direction for the five-decade-old alliance will be a difficult task.

Hatoyama says he wants to begin a review of the security ties formalized in 1960 with the aim of broadening ties longer term and a senior U.S. official said Obama shared that desire.

"Both leaders, I predict, will focus on 2010, next year, and the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty," a senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said earlier in the day.

"Certainly, President Obama believes that it's an opportunity to update and adapt the alliance to face some of those new challenges that I mentioned, particularly of the global and the transnational sort."

DEEPER QUESTIONS

No breakthroughs were likely in the feud over Futenma during Obama's visit, although Hatoyama said on Thursday he would tell the U.S. leader that Japan wanted to resolve the issue soon.

U.S. officials have made clear they want Tokyo to implement a 2006 deal under which Futenma, located in a crowded part of Okinawa, would be closed and replaced with a facility in a remoter part of the island. Replacing Futenma is a pre-requisite to shifting up to 8,000 Marines to the U.S. territory of Guam.

But Hatoyama said before the election that the base should be moved off Okinawa, fanning hopes of the island's residents, reluctant hosts to more than half the U.S. forces in Japan.

Entangled with the dispute are questions about reframing the alliance, given changing regional and global dynamics.