The strongest military alliances tend to be tempered on the battlefield, strengthened in combat against a mutual adversary. There, political bonds and effectiveness of military interoperability are put to the test.
For decades following the end of the postwar Occupation, the Japan-U.S. alliance had no such test ¡ª certainly nothing that required mass mobilization and coordinated response with such high stakes involved. That is, until Japan experienced a devastating earthquake in 2011 off the coast of Tohoku, triggering a tsunami that wiped out the northeastern coastline and sparking the nuclear disaster in Fukushima.
The allied response to the triple disaster on 3/11 through Joint Task Force Tohoku on the Japan Self-Defense Forces (SDF) side and Operation Tomodachi on the U.S. military side was unprecedented. Twenty-four thousand U.S. service members, 189 aircraft and 24 naval vessels joined the 106,000 SDF personnel in a weeks-long operation to stanch the damage and help put the nation back on its feet. While the two countries¡¯ forces had exercised together before, there was nothing they had done that could compare to this.
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