Since the spectacular election victory of the Democratic Party of Japan on August 30, Japan watchers and Japanese pundits alike have started to ponder the considerable challenges this new administration will face. The issue that concerns many observers, not least the United States, is that of Japan's future security policy. A distinct shift in the balance of the US-Japan alliance has been mooted by the incoming DPJ administration, and the US has already laid down an unmistakable hard line towards its fledgling counterparts in Japan, warning them against embarking on such a course. But instead of leaping into the realm of ''what might happen'', observers should look first to the past.

What does the DPJ mean when it says it aspires to ''a close and equal alliance with the USA''? The answer is not to be found in the behaviour of the DPJ in the upper house of Japan's Parliament, where it has held a majority since mid-2007. In repeatedly blocking renewal of the legislation that underpinned Japan's mission in the Indian Ocean to supply logistical support for US forces in Afghanistan, the DPJ was engaging in a ruthless political strategy to force the LDP to the polls. During the recent election campaign DPJ leaders made references to the desirability of revisiting the 2006 agreement on US Forces Realignment, and the Status of Forces Agreement governing relations between the Japanese community and US forces based in Japan. This has already prompted a sharp response from the US, but this premature rebuke is as unwise as it is out of step with the Obama Administration's stated goal of restoring the good name of the US in the international community. The DPJ may have been playing to the crowd in Okinawa when these statements were made, but these words were not merely the stuff of campaigning stump-talk. There is serious substance there too. The important thing is to understand the historical foundations behind these diverting statements.

The reality of Japanese politics in this new post-conservative territory of a DPJ-led Government in Japan is that in both its coalition with the leftist Social Democrats and the rightist New People's Party, and in the broad ideological spectrum of its own party, the shards of Japan's postwar history are attempting to gel. The fact that this is happening in the context of the manifestation at last of a genuine two-party system in the postwar era should alert us to the underlying significance of debates over security policy for the future shape of Japan's maturing democracy.

This is about defining Japan's democratic statehood, and the projection of Japan's identity as a developed democracy in the international community. Security policy and foreign policy are the issue areas that bring this into sharp relief, because they speak to the moral ambivalence, subordination and confused identity projection that accompanied Japan's emergence into the international community after defeat and occupation following World War II.

Japan's military alliance with the US was signed in 1951 alongside the peace treaty that delivered independence to Japan after six years of US-led occupation. It was clear that one would not occur without the other, and in a real sense, that Japan's independence was therefore conditional. Part of those conditions involved hosting US bases on Japanese soil and paying for them, a situation that remains in place to this day. The momentum of this alliance was deliberately lopsided, in that the US assumed responsibility for the defence of Japan in return for Japan's support for those military bases. The famous pacifist clause of Japan's 1947 constitution underpinned this situation through its historic renunciation of Japan's right as a state to wage war, or to possess the capacity to prosecute war. Ironically, Japan learned all too well the assumptions underscoring the US occupation, namely that democracy was essential to the emergence of a peacefully inclined state and people. In 1960 when the hawkish prime minister Nobusuke Kishi negotiated a revision of this security treaty, he did so by calling the revision a quest for more equality for Japan in the context of the alliance. The fact that this treaty revision was rammed through parliament after massive public demonstrations against the revisions, and in the absence of the socialist opposition that had been evicted by riot police before the midnight vote to pass the legislation, did not imbue this revised alliance with democratic legitimacy. Many Japanese were left disillusioned with the fact that as a supposedly independent and pacifist nation, Japan had ''chosen'' to renew and deepen its military alliance with the US. It not only violated their genuine adherence to pacifism as outlined in their postwar constitutional identity, but it also undermined their respect for their democracy.

In moving from confronting the static threats of the Cold War to the diffuse threats of the post-9/11 world, Japan has repeatedly revised its security policy through back-door, irresponsible channels. It was the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, not the elected representatives of Japan nor the judiciary, which defined the limits within which Japan could circumvent the provisions of the constitution. Now Japan has self-defence forces but not an army or navy; self-defence is deemed constitutional but collective self-defence is not; sending self-defence forces abroad to support the US is constitutional, but only if it takes the form of rear-guard action and does not involve bearing arms in anger.

With each blurring of constitutional interpretation, democratic ownership of Japan's security policy has been weakened. The achievements of prime minister Juinichiro Koizumi in finding ways to enable Japan to provide rear-guard support for US operations in Iraq, and for US operations in Afghanistan, represented both political opportunism and a realisation by many Japanese that Japan had to be a more pro-active pacifist nation. UN-led peacekeeping operations have become more accepted since 1991, but the lack of any sense of autonomy or real political accountability for those steps should be cause for disquiet. Moreover, many Japanese feel that Japan's security policy is a result of circumstance, or of followership of the US, and not related to any meaningful postwar Japanese identity or popular will translated into legislation.

Japanese have now overwhelmingly endorsed a new government that promises to shift policy development away from the bureaucracy to the political sphere. Japan's hard geo-political reality, sandwiched between a nuclear, ballistic missile-capable North Korea and a major military force in China, is not lost on any Japanese. Clearly an alliance with the US is the only road for Japan to follow in the foreseeable future. But without democratic accountability for the development of security policy and a real recognition of Japan's autonomy as an alliance partner, Japan's shift from proud postwar pacifist to active peacekeeper may undermine Japan's democratic integrity once more. Japan must feel it has chosen its course, and must actually do so, if its security policy is to represent peacefully inclined democratic maturity instead of incremental militarism, even if this means that Japan ultimately chooses a form of pacifism as its post-postwar national identity.

Rikki Kersten is professor of modern Japanese political history at the Australian National University and co-principle researcher in the Australia-Japan Foundation funded project on the Australia-Japan Security Relationship.