Japan's New Politics and the U.S.-Japan Alliance


Book Description

Japan's new politics challenge some basic assumptions about U.S.-Japan alliance management. CFR Senior Fellow Sheila A. Smith explores this new era of alternating parties in power and reveals the growing importance of Japan's domestic politics in shaping alliance cooperation.







Negotiating the U.S.–Japan Alliance


Book Description

In recent years, the U.S.–Japan alliance has marked several anniversaries, including 40 years since the 1969 decision on the reversion of Okinawa. These occasions have provided crucial opportunities to reassess the continuing significance of U.S.–Japan security and diplomatic relations, prompting this investigation into major issues in negotiations between the two countries. This book is the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the U.S. and Japanese foreign policy formulation and implementation processes from 1961 to 1978, which also explores the long-term strategic significance of the U.S. deterrence in East Asia. It is based on numerous declassified and previously unused U.S. and Japanese documents, oral histories, and the author’s interviews with former officials. The book traces the origins of contemporary security and diplomatic issues back to the 1961–1978 U.S.–Japan negotiations involving secret arrangements in the reversion of Okinawa, Japan’s defense build-up, including the question of Japan’s nuclear option, and U.S.–Japan defense cooperation. Through a systematic assessment of the behind-the-scenes discussions, Dr Yukinori Komine demonstrates that external security calculations were consistently primary factors in U.S.–Japan relations. The book concludes by making policy-relevant suggestions, important for the "Pacific Century". This book offers crucial contributions to the ongoing debate regarding the increasing need for greater transparency and burden-sharing in the U.S.–Japan alliance. It will appeal to scholars and students of International Relations of the Asia-Pacific region, East Asia–U.S. relations, U.S. Politics and Japanese Politics, as well as Foreign Policy.




Pacific Alliance


Book Description

Despite the enduring importance of the U.S.-Japan security alliance, the broader relationship between the two countries is today beset by sobering new difficulties. In this comprehensive comparative analysis of the transpacific alliance and its political, economic, and social foundations, Kent E. Calder, a leading Japan specialist, asserts that bilateral relations between the two countries are dangerously eroding as both seek broader options in a globally oriented world. Calder documents the quiet erosion of America's multidimensional ties with Japan as China rises, generations change, and new forces arise in both American and Japanese politics. He then assesses consequences for a twenty-first-century military alliance with formidable coordination requirements, explores alternative foreign paradigms for dealing with the United States, adopted by Britain, Germany, and China, and offers prescriptions for restoring U.S.-Japan relations to vitality once again.




New Perspectives on U.S.-Japan Relations


Book Description

How relevant today is an alliance that was forged between a powerful United States and a weak Japan in the context of a cold war struggle with the Soviet Union? In what ways have the changes in the relative power positions of the two countries and the structural changes in the world economy created new challenges to the U.S.-Japan relationship and how are the two countries responding to those challenges? These are some of the important questions addressed by the eight Japanese and American authors of this volume. Their focus ranges from issues of military relations, trade and financial management, and shifting security perspectives to the roles of the mass media in the bilateral relationship. A truly binational effort, the book brings together the thinking of some of the best-trained younger political scientists to focus on the present and future of one of the most important bilateral relationships in the world.




Japan’s Security Renaissance


Book Description

For decades after World War II, Japan chose to focus on soft power and economic diplomacy alongside a close alliance with the United States, eschewing a potential leadership role in regional and global security. Since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the rise of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan's military capabilities have resurged. In this analysis of Japan's changing military policy, Andrew L. Oros shows how a gradual awakening to new security challenges has culminated in the multifaceted "security renaissance" of the past decade. Despite openness to new approaches, however, three historical legacies—contested memories of the Pacific War and Imperial Japan, postwar anti-militarist convictions, and an unequal relationship with the United States—play an outsized role. In Japan's Security Renaissance Oros argues that Japan's future security policies will continue to be shaped by these legacies, which Japanese leaders have struggled to address. He argues that claims of rising nationalism in Japan are overstated, but there has been a discernable shift favoring the conservative Abe and his Liberal Democratic Party. Bringing together Japanese domestic politics with the broader geopolitical landscape of East Asia and the world, Japan's Security Renaissance provides guidance on this century's emerging international dynamics.




U.S.-Japan Relations in a Changing World


Book Description

September 2001 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the San Francisco Treaty, formally ending the Second World War. In signing this treaty, Japan fundamentally transformed its position on the world stage. It established itself in the vanguard of the burgeoning cold war bulwark against the Soviet Union and its communist satellites, and wed itself to the United States through economic, political, and security ties that persist today. The half century since the establishment of the San Francisco system has seen highs and lows in the relations between the two countries, continuing even into the current war on terrorism. This new book evaluates the changing relationship between the two great powers, providing in-depth analysis on a variety of topics. It scrutinizes the historical context, providing the reader with predictive tools for understanding events as they unfold. Instead of looking at the U.S.-Japan relationship one issue at a time, this book examines specific trends and then analyzes how these trends affect the relationship as a whole. This innovative approach allows the reader to view several perspectives simultaneously, and it compels the contributors to assemble clear causal arguments that detail what each factor can and cannot explain. The result is a cogent and convincing appraisal of the status and future of U.S.-Japan relations after fifty years of peaceful coexistence.




Managing an Alliance


Book Description

The alliance between Japan and the United States has entered a new era. Successful in promoting mutually beneficial relations during the cold war era, it must now be adapted to a world of detente and new dealings with China. Effective in helping the vulnerable postwar Japanese economy recover domestically and expand its trade internationally, it is now confronted with the different issues accompanying Japan's rise to third rank among the world's economic powers. The alliance remains important because effective cooperation between Japan and the United States is indispensable to regional stability in East Asia and to a workable world economic order. This study of the politics and processes that influence U.S.-Japanese relations draws heavily on three episodes: revision of the bilateral security treaty in 1960; agreement on reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1969; and the dispute in 1969-71 over Japanese textile exports to the United States. All three illustrate differences and similarities in the national political and bureaucratic institutions through which policy decisions and actions are taken, how officials in each government perceive actions taken by the other, and recurrent patterns of misperception. The authors' analysis of U.S. and Japanese negotiating tactics constitutes a guide to effective political management and consensus-building within each country. The study also accounts for the ways in which issues arise, the channels through which they are negotiated, and the effect of actions in one system on decisionmaking in the other. The authors conclude with suggestions about how to reduce tension and promote constructive bilateral relations—suggestions that they believe to be relevant to the conduct of U.S. relations with other major allies.




The U.S.-Japan Security Alliance


Book Description

In this book, American and Japanese experts examine to what extent diverging priorities in the U.S.-Japan alliance are real and whether they are not remedied with political and diplomatic leadership and other processes. American and Japanese authors are paired to analyze the same topic, where doing so is possible, for comparing their perspectives.




Beyond Bilateralism


Book Description

Beyond Bilateralism analyzes how, and to what extent, crucial global and regional security, finance, and trade transformations have altered the U.S.-Japan relationship and how that bilateral relationship has in turn influenced those global and regional trends.