PaulTB said:
I think the favoured word is
"Poodle".
Here is information about that:
From their perspective, Britain is the United States' closest ally in Europe and Japan is its closest ally in Asia. But unlike Britain, Japan still cannot fully be involved in US military operations. Article 9 of the Japanese constitution prohibits the use of force as a means of settling international disputes, and the SDF is authorized to fight only if Japan itself is invaded, and then only on Japanese territory or in the surrounding sea and air. For this reason, Japanese troops were deployed to Samawah, a southern Iraqi city, which the Japanese government claims as non-combat zone, strictly on a "humanitarian" mission. The 2003 Special Measures Law stipulates that the SDF can only be sent to areas where hostilities are not under way. To send troops into a combat zone would violate this law.
Article 9 of the constitution, the "war-renouncing" provision, states:
1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of aggression of the state will not be recognized.
US officials appear to welcome a change in this state of military affairs in Japan and then seek a heightened level of the US-Japan alliance in the future - to parallel the US-British alliance. Washington has urged Tokyo to amend Article 9 and to authorize the right to collective self-defense. (Japan's current official stance is that it has this right, but cannot invoke it under the current constitution.) US military planners clearly want Tokyo to expand the SDF's activities to support US-led operations in Asia and elsewhere in the future. They may want to capitalize on the close personal ties between Bush and Koizumi to achieve their political and military ends.
This idea of transforming Japan into "Britain of the Far East" is nothing new. Richard Armitage, the former US deputy secretary of state, who has extensive knowledge of Japan, once expressed this idea in a special report for the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (in Washington, DC): This report has since been commonly known as the Armitage Report, referring to Japan as the "Britain of the Far East". Many senior officials have adopted that concept and used the expression. Michael Green, the current National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs, was a member of the Armitage group. On October 11, 2000, the study group led by Armitage, then president of Armitage Associates, said, "We see the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain as a model for the [US-Japan] alliance."
The rest of the article can be found here:
atimes.com