Hatoyama off to Washington with dim prospects for progress on Futemma+

TOKYO, April 10 Kyodo -
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama and U.S. President Barack Obama will be seated
next to each other at a banquet for a nuclear summit in Washington next Monday,
but it will be the only opportunity for the Japanese leader to speak to Obama
during his upcoming two-day visit to the U.S. capital.
The dinner is scheduled to last one and a half hours and is being seen as a
diplomatic consideration after Hatoyama was left out of the list of leaders set
to meet with host Obama for official bilateral talks on the sidelines of the
Nuclear Security Summit.
Hatoyama, in office for almost seven months, has been unable to find a solution
to the issue of relocating a U.S. Marine base in Japan's Okinawa Prefecture
ahead of his self-imposed end-of-May deadline.
His U.S. trip this time, however, is unlikely to achieve a breakthrough
considering the limited time at a largely ceremonial occasion allocated to the
increasingly embattled Democratic Party of Japan leader.
For Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate seeking worldwide nuclear disarmament,
the two-day summit from Monday is a crucial event aimed at containing the
threat of nuclear terrorism.
The summit will bring together representatives from 47 countries including five
declared nuclear states -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States
-- as well as India and Pakistan, which possess nuclear weapons and have
refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The White House has announced that Obama will meet bilaterally with Chinese
President Hu Jintao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as well as leaders
from seven other countries.
There is speculation that Washington has refrained from arranging formal talks
between Hatoyama and Obama amid few prospects for Tokyo resolving the issue of
the relocation of the U.S. Marine Corps' Futemma Air Station anytime soon.
Observers say it is likely that Obama will be eager to listen to the views of
Hatoyama, the leader of the only country to have experienced atomic bombings
and one that promotes the peaceful use of nuclear power, during the banquet,
but not on the deadlocked U.S. base issue.
At the summit, Hatoyama plans to announce the idea of establishing a nuclear
security support facility in Japan with the aim of beefing up nonproliferation
and security measures against nuclear terrorism.
It would obviously be inappropriate for Hatoyama to bring up the Futemma issue,
which has become a major headache for both Japan and the United States since
the premier promised last year to come up with an alternative relocation plan
to the current one sealed by the two countries in 2006.
Without the U.S. base row, Japan and the United States could have focused on
more positive aspects of their alliance as they mark the 50th anniversary of
the signing of their revised bilateral security treaty.
Still, Hatoyama has said he plans to touch on Futemma during the banquet with
the U.S. president.
''I would like to tell him about how progress has been made (on the Futemma
issue) one way or another,'' he told reporters recently.
But U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos has told Japanese Foreign Minister
Katsuya Okada that Washington would not be ready to launch working-level talks
on the issue, which Tokyo was planning to start as early as next week, unless
Japan presents concrete plans and secures the consent of the local residents
involved.
==Kyodo