ABSTRACT
The Americans took on the self-imposed task of teaching Japan to live "more safely and usefully in the modern age," while the Japanese in turn made their special relationship with their conquerors the overriding feature of the nation's foreign policy. Some of the sources of potential or actual tension between Japan and the United States seem to have been much reduced. The issues of China and the United States-Japan security treaty for the moment, anyway, have lost a great deal of their capacity for causing friction. Japan's economic relationship with Taiwan turned out to be surprisingly rewarding, while Peking showed only limited and sporadic interest in trade and economic relations with Japan or other non-Communist states. Aside from ideological objections to a defensive alliance with the main capitalist power, Japanese misgivings centered on the possibility that the country might find itself a partner in an unwanted, perhaps nuclear, war as long as US forces could operate from bases in Japan.
