Hands across the Sea
By ROGIER BUSSER
The 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo marked the acceptance of Japan by the international community. It was also the year in which the first Shinkansen or bullet train impressed the world, the year in which Japan was admitted as a member of the OECD and signed the International Monetary Fund article 8. American cold-war policies to make Japan into an economic and political ally had obviously succeeded. However, soon the Vietnam war turned out to be an event that exerted serious pressure on the American-Japanese relationship. Although Japan was involved in the conflict because the American use of air bases in Japan, the Sato administration was not consulted by President Johnson when the Americans decided to start bombing North-Vietnam. Both, the polarization within Japan over this issue and the strong negative influence on the bilateral relationship, rose to the extent that the Tokyo born American ambassador Reischauer warned president Johnson in 1965 by saying that the loss of Japan would be more serious to U.S. interests than the loss of Vietnam.On July 15, 1971, Nixon unexpectedly announced Kissinger's visit to China and his own forthcoming trip to Peking. In Tokyo, this event was soon after labelled as the Nikuson shokku (Nixon shock) because the American president had made his announcement without any prior consultation with the Japanese prime-minister Sato. To all those Japanese who had already for a long time felt reluctance over the Japanese policy towards China, the Nixon shock triggered a cry for a more independent, pro-active and assertive foreign policy.
These two examples indicate that it was foremost the Asia policy of Washington and much less economic issues that in the eyes of policy makers in Tokyo put the bilateral relationship under pressure. The academic debate on the development of American-Japanese diplomatic postwar relations has for the last years been dominated by the question if it is for any longer correct to describe Japanese foreign policy as merely reactive, responsive to pressure from outside or that it has been innovative and initiating from an early point of time. Mega does not bring himself into this ongoing debate. Instead he takes a very different approach in his book on the U.S.-Japan relation in the period 1961-1981. Mega eloquently describes the changing patterns of the bilateral relationship by focusing on how successive American administrations dealt with Japan. In four chapters Mega discusses the development of the bilateral American-Japanese relationship under the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. Making extensive use of American archives and oral interviews with many American foreign policymakers, Maga describes interestingly the thoughts, ideas and perceptions of American presidents and policymakers on Japan. The book is valuable because it presents us with abundant inside information and personal views of American policymakers that were engaged in the development of the probably most important bilateral relationship in the world. The reader learns about the backgrounds of the presidential advisors, becomes aware of American perceptions of developments in Asia and gets informed about struggles within the State Department's bureaucracy, for example U.S. Ambassador in Tokyo, Johnson (nephew of president Johnson) commenting on his predecessor Reischauer: "he treated the Japanese like children, talking down to them from the position of his own great intellectual prowess."
While Mega shows a deep understanding of the mechanisms that steer American politics, the book lacks a proper understanding of Japanese foreign policymaking. Consequently, the book overlooks a number of important Japanese diplomatic initiatives in the Asian arena. The Japanese efforts in the establishment of the Asian Development Bank and the reward of having the first president of the Bank is not mentioned by Mega. Neither is the omni-directional foreign policy of Prime-minister Tanaka Kakuei in the early 1970's mentioned, while this is commonly perceived as the end of the era in which Japan followed American foreign policies blindly. The large anti-Japanese demonstrations of early 1974 in Southeast Asia and its impact on the U.S.-Japanese relationship is also overlooked by Mega. These anti-Japanese outbursts are of great importance for a proper appreciation of the Fukuda doctrine of 1977. In particular Fukuda's idea to bring Vietnam closer to the ASEAN countries provoked a rather strong American reaction which in its turn reinforced Japanese independent foreign policymaking. Although the Fukuda-doctrine is a highlight of independence in Japanese Asia policy making, it is not raised in this study.
Mega, obviously, neglects these Japanese attempts to formulate an pro-active Asian policy. This raises the question why Mega, unlike for example Walter LaFeber in his study entitled "The Clash, A history of U.S.-Japan Relations" (1997) preferred to leave this out of his study. Whatever the answer to this question might be, the result is that the book lacks to inform the reader about Japanese ideas and policies and let the careful reader grope in the dark in understanding the interaction between American and Japanese policies. *
Timothy P. Mega
HANDS ACROSS THE SEA
US-JAPAN RELATIONS, 1961-1981
Rogier Busser, Department of Japanese Studies, Leiden University