To hear some people in Washington tell it, you would think the Japanese had just made Hugo Chávez their paramount leader. The pledge by Yukio Hatoyama’s victorious Democratic Party of Japan to carve out a foreign policy “less dependent” on the US, plus the newly anointed prime minister’s doubts about what he called “US-led market fundamentalism” have been received with all the equanimity that might have greeted a decision to sequester American oil assets.

The conservative Heritage Foundation was one of many to hit the panic button. On the day the DPJ broke the Liberal Democratic party’s half-century grip on power, it detected a “rumbling across the Pacific Ocean” and the ascent of a “left-of-centre party that has long spouted anti-capitalist and anti-US rhetoric”. Even officials inside Mr Obama’s administration have been privately nervous about the implications for the US-Japan alliance, which has for 60 years helped keep peace in a region still bristling with wartime rancour.