The party winds down?

Monthly figures can be volatile, and can be revised, so it is risky to draw conclusions from one month’s data. (Why should we ever let that stop us?)

...Asia’s appetite for Treasury securities is not growing as fast as it once did. That means the United States will have to turn to other buyers, including American citizens, who are now saving as they did not do during the boom years, to finance the deficits...

As usual, Japan fails to surprise:

...Japan, which was replaced by China as the largest foreign holder of Treasuries last year, has been a larger buyer this year, taking up 11 percent of the new supply of Treasuries...New York Times

Perhaps that is what Yukio Hatoyama meant by "maintain its....economic independence."

In 5 years we'll look back and see if any of this turned out to be true. Otherwise, it's just an interesting fluctuation which is useful for newspaper reports and blog posts derived from them.