Senator Jim Webb to Visit Japan, Guam

Washington, DC— U.S. Senator Jim Webb, who chairs the Senate Committee on Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee and the Committee on Foreign Relations East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, will visit Japan and Guam February 13-20, 2010.  A strong proponent of the vital interests served by a healthy U.S.-Japan relationship, Webb is traveling to Tokyo, Okinawa, and Guam in order to listen carefully to the views of the current Japanese government, the leaders and citizens of Okinawa and Guam, and U.S. military leaders and personnel stationed in the Pacific region.  This will be his first visit to Japan since the change in government last year.

Senator Webb has long experience in Japan, Okinawa and Guam, on both the diplomatic and military fronts, spanning a period of more than 40 years. 

Webb first spent time on Okinawa as a U.S. Marine during the Vietnam War and then revisited the island in the 1970s as a defense planner, when he wrote an analysis of the U.S. basing structure in Japan and Guam.  He has also visited Japan and Okinawa extensively as a novelist, journalist, government official, guest of the American military, and as an official guest of the Japanese government.  In 1987 while serving as Secretary of the Navy, Senator Webb personally returned the bell from Okinawa’s Gokokuji Temple, which had been taken in 1853 by Commodore Matthew Perry and displayed at the U.S. Naval Academy.  As a journalist, he wrote a groundbreaking study of the Japanese prison system, and he also has written frequently about U.S.-Japanese relations. Most of his book The Emperor’s General, an historic novel focusing on General Douglas McArthur, is set in post-war Japan.

During the mid-1970s, Senator Webb made two extended visits to Guam, conducting a detailed study of the U.S. defense strategy in Asia and assessing the impact on Guam and the Marianas Islands of a possible restructuring of U.S. bases in that region.  Many of his observations from more than 30 years ago resonate in the current discussions about realigning U.S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam.

In the Senate, in addition to chairing the Foreign Relations Committee's East Asian and Pacific Affairs subcommittee and the Armed Services Committee’s Personnel Subcommittee, Senator Webb is the co-chair of the Congressional Study Group on Japan.  He also was recently honored as one of America’s most distinguished leaders by the Japan-America Society during its 2009 Annual Public Affairs Dinner.