A year after the United States went to war against Iraq, Japanese people are asking themselves what it really meant to Japan. All questions begin with a central fact that underscores Japanese foreign policy: Japan and the U.S. are bound closely together under a bilateral security treaty. Yet many are wondering whether the government was right to throw its full weight behind a preemptive war that had no explicit backing of the United Nations.

The invasion all but destroyed Western unity, with France and Germany parting with the U.S. and Britain. Paris and Berlin -- advocates of a peaceful solution -- argued that the U.N. hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction should be continued. But Washington and London -- proponents of a military solution -- maintained that the use of force was the only way to meet an imminent threat of WMD. As U.S. President George W. Bush put it, nations were "either with us or against us." Japan joined the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing," thus acquiescing in the use of force against Iraq. Stressing the primacy of the Japan-U.S. alliance relationship, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi expressed clear-cut support for the war. But much of the Japanese public was unconvinced.

That support signaled, at least temporarily, a shift of emphasis in Japanese foreign policy -- a shift to closer cooperation with America and away from U.N.-centered international cooperation. That did not necessarily mean a switch from multilateralism to unilateralism, but there was no denying that public confidence in Japan's professed U.N. policy had suffered.