As The Times/CBS News/Tokyo Broadcasting System poll showed, many Japanese opposed the gulf war and generally are more opposed than Americans to using American military force in the world. This contradiction could become a crisis in a future conflict requiring American troops based in Japan.

"Americans would be wise to abandon the term 'burden sharing' because it both reeks of American self-righteousness and amounts to a self-advertisement of America's declining ability to carry out an independent foreign policy," Chalmers Johnson, Rohr professor of Pacific international relations at the University of California at San Diego, wrote recently.

Moreover, many Japanese feel that the concentration of 29,000 marines in Okinawa cannot last. The new governor of that island has for the first time demanded an American withdrawal, a step that would eliminate a base from which the first marines traveled to the gulf last year.

At the heart of the Japanese-American relationship have been efforts on myriad fronts to reduce the trade deficit, which has in fact fallen in recent years. But all the negotiations, even those that have yielded results, have taken their toll in a subtle way.

"The Japanese find it hard to make concessions, only to be faced with new demands," said Michael C. Armacost, the United States Ambassador, in explaining the Japanese inflexibiity. "We find it frustrating to have to demand that Japan market access that we extend in our own country. I wish there was another way of doing these things."

American leaders are nettled by the refusal of Japan to lift its ban on rice imports or take other steps to break the deadlock in the current Uruguay Round of trade talks. In Washington's view, Tokyo is not protecting and defending the world trading system from which it benefits more than any other nation.

The United States trade deficit with Japan has narrowed to $41 billion last year from a peak of $56 billion in 1987, and there have been agreements on supercomputers, semiconductors, construction contracts and many other sectors. Japan's imports from the United States have doubled in five years. But both sides agree that the long-term trends are disturbing. The deficit is bound to go back up as the United States recovers from its recession and the demand for imports surges. Japan is also exporting more to the United States indirectly, from factories in other parts of Asia and is commanding a larger share of the American market through goods produced in its own American factories, too.