ABSTRACT
Manila was the last stop on Prime Minister Fukuda’s tour of Southeast Asia, and it was there on august 17, 1977, that he delivered his important speech on Japan’s policy toward that region. Japanese news media billed the event as the epoch-making unveiling of the Fukuda Doctrine, finding deep significance in the very fact that such a speech was made. One of the main US goals in the Vietnam War was the containment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Insofar as postwar Vietnam and Laos have remained free of PRC influence and the Indochinese peninsula as a whole bears few marks of PRC domination, the US policy of containment has been successful. The end of the Vietnam War brought no reduction at all in Southeast Asia’s relative weight in Japanese foreign policy priorities. While this came as a surprise to many, it was, in a way, only natural.
