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Actually, Marmot’s posting says the Japan Research Centre conducted the Japanese survey.

They probably made a fuck up in some way, choosing respondants at China-towns or something.
China 8.1% is totally unthinkable.

Except for dyed-in-the-wall US haters (which would include leftist groups in South Korea that see the US as the true aggressor in the Korean War), most of this phenomenon is directly attributable to the synergy of how and why the Iraq War was started and Bush’s barrage of belligerent rhetoric (compared with his predecessors’ rhetoric) against North Korea.

Whether one supports Bush’s actions or not, the fact is that a sizable portion of the world, including a lot of voters in our democratic allies, saw the Iraq War as a foregone conclusion based on a false pretext; the democracy we have promised is flimsy at best and the country has largely been turned into a war zone. That same president’s rhetoric seems to indicate that he has a willingness to go and do the same in North Korea, maybe before all the evidence is in, or on trumped-up evidence like with Iraq. If that happens, these people believe, their lives in South Korea and Japan are in danger.

North Korea is not about to attack, China is not about to attack, but Bush’s actions and rhetoric indicate he really might. Therefore, to them, the United States is the greatest danger to security.

I’m not saying I support this view, just that this view is out there and it’s not at all irrational, given the evidence before us. That tens of millions of voters in America’s democratic allies South Korea and Japan (even more if we count Canada, Western Europe, Australia, etc.) is one of the costs of the war which we may end up paying for heavily down the road.

But the good news is that this so-called “United States threat” is heavily tied to Bush. It will not necessarily automatically carry over to a different administration, even a Republican one (unless it is seen as very closely tied with the current one). If a North Korean deal is reached, and especially if the issue of human rights in North Korea becomes a key theme (and it’s seen as credible), then this could change even with Bush in office (though I think that is highly optimistic).

These are mere statistics, and like IQ tests, a few numbers do not provide the whole picture. In some sense I’m glad that 11% of Japanese feel the same way that 20% of the South Koreans do, because it makes this point much clearer.

(Odd how the Communist Mainland and Nationalist Taiwanese governments somehow managed to more or less peacefully coexist, as long as the KMT on the island continued to maintain that they were the legitimate government over all of China, while Beijing now cannot bear the idea of Taiwanese independence, even though Taiwan has been a de facto separate country since 1949.)

“Japanese respondents cited North Korea (64.6 percent), followed by the United States (10.8 percent), ‘none in particular’ (9.3 percent) and China (8.1 percent). Marmot??s note: I found the Japanese responses quite surprising, especially concerning China.”

That is surprising. Given that the usual Korea-bashers on this blog complain (understandably, I’ll admit) about Koreans fearing the US more than China, it’s interesting that evidently, the same is true in Japan!

(Although from a statistician’s point of view, this is nullified by the margin of error, because the numbers for the US and China are within 2.9% of each other….)

yeah!!!!!!!