ABSTRACT
IN THE TWENTY YEARS between the San Francisco Peace Treaty and Henry Kissinger's visit to Peking in 1971, Japanese diplomacy was the object of continuous domestic criticism. Many Japanese simply claimed that their country had no independent foreign policy; others were more uncertain and demanded proof that Japanese diplomacy was in more than a state of suspended animation. 1 For such critics Japan appeared like a junior climber, roped to a more muscular American partner, simply following in the footholds marked out by dominant secretaries of state. Such criticisms were understandable, for postwar Japanese policy was deeply coloured by American influence. In the occupation years (1945–52), Japan's conservative leaders had chosen capitalist democracy as the basic pattern of their society. They had rightly seen the United States as the dominant economy of the contemporary world. By February 1950, Japan faced a hostile Sino-Soviet military alliance; furthermore, Russian treatment of Japanese prisoners of war scarcely attracted Japan towards friendship with the Soviet Union. 2 Yet, even if the clear choices made by Prime Minister Yoshida and his successors did not constitute a fully independent policy, it would be a gross over-simplification to dismiss all the labours of Japanese foreign ministers as responses to the dictates of the United States. Japan's resistance to American pressures for rapid rearmament, her special relationship with President Sukarno of Indonesia, her conduct of reparations negotiations with Southeast Asian states, and her refusal to join a SEATO-style military alliance—or to participate in the Vietnam war—indicate that the nation was following a distinctive policy. 3 This diplomacy was wisely constructed to hold in equilibrium friendship with America, pacifist opinion at home, and the pursuit of economic improvement. Yet criticism of this policy as being negligible or disappointing was understandable. In the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa eras, Japan had pursued a vigorous policy which was the most striking of any Asian nation. In comparison with this memory, the diplomacy of the 1950s and 1960s seemed lethargic. What was worse was that other countries had replaced Japan as the political champions of Asia. By the 1960s Japan's economy thrived and her people prospered. But for many years India —then clearly non-aligned—spoke for Asian neutralism, while the ideological diplomacy of Peking suggested that Chinese policy was more idealistic than Japan's quiet pragmatism. However, Japan had not only been displaced as a diplomatic leader, but by virtue of American pressure she was also isolated politically from her nearest neighbour, Communist China. For millions of Japanese this was an undignified position. To radicals it meant isolation from a model society; to many businessmen, it meant exclusion from an immense market. 4
