I live in a conservative area of Japan (about an hour by train north of Kyoto, on the Japan Sea side of Honshu), but even here all the Japanese remain skeptical of the military 'solutions' the US is talking about. There still is some memory of the total destruction of Fukui City by fire bombing in WW II. The hill-top park in the middle of the city is really a cemetary complex and memorial for all those who perished.
It would seem the younger a Fukui person is, the more impressed they are with US swagger, but in a way that really doesn't know what it all means.
Even many LDP-types didn't much care for the Persian Gulf War, where Japan took a lot of anti-Japan rhetoric from the US hawks and then had to cough up 12-16 billion dollars (depending on which exchange rate you use) to keep James Baker from shitting his pants.
One popular American belief was that Japan didn't participate militarily, but it did in many ways. It just didn't send ground troops (while token forces from France and Italy kept them from being dunned by by the Baker-Bush presidency). Japan did, in the 1990s, send police and Self-Defence force troops to Cambodia under the command of the U.N.
One thing has changed: Japanese has lost the 'Disney' image of the US as a great place to go an spend their hugely over-valued yen.
The US tourism industry is going to take a huge hit, since many of those rich tourists from Asia and Europe may well look elsewhere for a place to relax.
Charles Jannuzi