Go to the first chapter of "The Clash"

Go to Chapter One

The Sun and the Stars

The relationship of the United States and Japan, often referred to by former ambassador Mike Mansfield as our most important international connection "bar none," has taken on new strains as well as new dimensions in the post-Cold War era. Although the economic confrontations of the late Bush and early Clinton administrations have receded, the underlying contradictions between the policies of the world's two largest national economies seem poised to produce renewed discord in the months ahead. As American military dominance in the Pacific has been reduced, Japan is being forced to confront its future security roles within or without the U.S. alliance. In this respect both nations are struggling to deal with a powerful new factor affecting their relations: the rise of China.

Despite its crucial importance, the U.S.-Japan relationship has suffered from a lack of historical perspective on the part of policymakers and the public. Many books have been published in English about various aspects of Japanese life, economy and history, but until now no comprehensive and readable account has been available in one volume to record the development of the relationship from its beginnings to the post-Cold War era.

Now comes Walter LaFeber, a Cornell University diplomatic historian and the author of well-received volumes on the Cold War, the Panama Canal and the U.S. role in Central America, among other topics, with a book that aims to fill the gap. For the most part, he succeeds brilliantly.

The Clash takes the reader from the armed steamships of Commodore Matthew Perry, which opened Japan to trade and initiated the U.S.-Japan relationship in 1853, to the rape of a Japanese schoolgirl in 1995, which generated a new round of negotiations about the U.S. military presence in the island state. As LaFeber says, "few relationships have been as eventful." In less than a century and a half, the two nations have gone from hostility to friendship to rivalry to war to occupation to alliance to the current complex mixture of cooperation and confrontation.

LaFeber is not a Japan hand with extensive background knowledge of that country -- The Clash is his first major work in this field. He compensates for this with impressive scholarly skills, with which he has mined dozens of previous works on the subject, including up-to-date English-language and translated Japanese materials, as well as newly available government documents. His well-researched, meticulously sourced and highly readable account manages to produce fresh insights and fascinating details on many well-known historical episodes, including Japan's decision to attack Pearl Harbor, Gen. Douglas MacArthur's creation of a new Japan in the postwar U.S. occupation, and the bilateral machinations and negotiations from the 1950s to the 1990s. To a greater degree than most books about Japan policy, LaFeber manages to capture the personalities and maneuvers on both sides of the Pacific.

LaFeber's broad background in American diplomatic history serves the reader well, as he relates the interaction between Tokyo and Washington to other international developments. He is particularly informative on the recurrent bouts of U.S.-Japan competition in China, a major theme of the book.

Coming from the so-called Wisconsin school of diplomatic historians that initially focused on misuses of American power, LaFeber makes much of the 1994 New York Times revelations that the CIA secretly provided cash to Japan's long-ruling Liberal Democratic (conservative) Party in the 1950s and 1960s. He returns to the subject of this aid time and again, although conceding that, given the abundant resources of Japanese politics, the money didn't amount to much. The discussion of U.S. covert financial intervention, which paralleled secret CIA funding for political parties in Western Europe and elsewhere, is an ironic reminder, amid Washington's preoccupation with Asian funding for American politics, that political money can flow both ways across U.S. shores.

As he approaches the end of his narrative in the 1990s, LaFeber's historical method is less effective. He began writing the book in 1991-92, the low point in contemporary U.S.-Japan relations, and he has not taken sufficient account of the American economy's resurgent strength in the information age, the prolonged Japanese recession or the political and economic changes it has set in motion. As a result, he seems to me to be more pessimistic than is warranted about the relationship's present and immediate future.

As the title of the book proclaims, the two nations have clashed often, most dramatically in World War II. Nonetheless, their postwar interaction has been extraordinarily deep and intense and their affiliation surprisingly resilient. Given the immense contrasts in history, geography and ways of thinking between the United States and Japan, "the clash" is less remarkable than the continuing alliance of two of the most dissimilar nations on earth.

Don Oberdorfer, a former Northeast Asia and diplomatic correspondent for The Post, is journalist in residence at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. His new book, "The Two Koreas," is forthcoming.