ABSTRACT
Japan’s surrender on 15 August 1945 marked several crucial events. First of all, clearly, there was the simple fact of surrender, occupation, demilitarization and the removal, however temporary, of Japan from the ranks of the Great Powers. Second, the end of World War II confirmed the position of the United States (US) as the pre-eminent Western power. Britain, while still powerful, had been clearly replaced in East Asia, and, particularly from the latter half of the 1950s onwards, London looked increasingly to Western Europe and the US, rather than the former Empire, for military security and economic prosperity. Nonetheless, one should also be wary of overemphasizing these trends, notably for the late 1940s and the early 1950s. Redeveloping effective and coherent diplomatic relations with Japan, whether they be in economic or military contexts, was an important task for Britain. This process does not imply affection: the war against Japan was fresh in popular memory, most obviously with the fate of former prisoners of war (PoWs) attracting attention. The promotion of Anglo-Japanese acceptance and relations in the diplomatic sphere had to be conducted not only with recent memories of the rapid and humiliating loss of empire to Japan in the early stages of war, but also with an often uncomfortable awareness of post-war US dominance (even more so in Western relations with Japan) and the emerging British Commonwealth with its own increasingly jumbled and potentially conflicting views of Japan and the nation’s place in the post-war order.
