The 1970s: Stresses on the Relationship

Abstract

The 1970s were a decade of crisis and hardship for both the US and Japan. The US’s disastrous involvement in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s resulted in dire impacts on the economy, society, and national morale in the 1970s. At the same time, 1970s Japan faced the repercussions of its rapid economic development of the 1960s.

President Nixon’s decision in 1971 to visit China without any advance warning being given to Japan, the first of a series of events known in Japan as the “Nixon Shocks,” highlighted the potential risk of Japan losing what it had believed to be its guaranteed position as the US’s partner in Asia. The New Economic Policy unveiled by the Nixon administration, known as the “second Nixon Shock,” and the oil crisis of 1973 then signaled the collapse of the free trade system. As the grand-scale strategies of the Nixon and Kissinger foreign diplomacy also neglected Japan, Japan–US relations in the 1970s began in a context of crisis and based on wavering trust. However, ten years later, with the outbreak of new Cold War developments on the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, US–Japan relations developed into a real alliance. The 1970s were a key stage in which Japan–US relations fully developed through a process of experiencing, overcoming, and learning from crisis.