ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on less well known information to suggest some of the constraints on Japan’s policy toward the Middle East. A survey of the post-World War II history of Japan suggests that the character of its primary energy supply was the least determined of all the imperatives of development addressed throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The importance of the Middle East for Japan’s exports was also evidenced by Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone’s aggravated desire to visit the Middle East, as expressed during the 1982 visit of King Hussein of Jordan to Japan. Japan must not only overcome the suspicion of nuclear power of an aging population in general and its siting in particular, it must also sort out the bureaucratic conflict over which nuclearization program to follow. By 1973, Japan was fully engaged in trying to negotiate the early stages of its transition from heavy to knowledge-intensive industry.
