Using recently released archival material from the US and Japan, this book critically re-examines US–Japanese relations during the tenure of Satō Eisaku, Japan’s longest serving prime minister. During these critical years in the Cold War in Asia, with the Vietnam War raging and the acquisition by China of a nuclear capability, Satō closely aligned with the US. This directly contributed to his success in securing the reversion of Okinawa and other Japanese territories which had remained under US control since Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II. To accomplish this he was also forced to conclude secret agreements with President Richard Nixon, including one on nuclear weapons, which are explored fully. Satō faced the challenge of the Nixon administration’s attempts to shore up the relative decline in American power with policies at odds with allied interests. Satō successfully overcame such challenges and also laid the groundwork for Japan’s anti-nuclear policy.
"Our camp, they tell us, is now to be called a 'relocation center' and not a 'concentration camp.' We are internees, not prisoners. Here's the truth: I am now a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. I sleep on a canvas cot under which is a suitcase with my life's belongings: a change of clothes, underwear, a notebook and pencil. Why?"—Kiyo Sato In 1941 Kiyo Sato and her eight younger siblings lived with their parents on a small farm near Sacramento, California, where they grew strawberries, nuts, and other crops. Kiyo had started college the year before when she was eighteen, and her eldest brother, Seiji, would soon join the US Army. The younger children attended school and worked on the farm after class and on Saturday. On Sunday, they went to church. The Satos were an ordinary American family. Until they weren't. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, US president Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan and the United States officially entered World War II. Soon after, in February and March 1942, Roosevelt signed two executive orders which paved the way for the military to round up all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast and incarcerate them in isolated internment camps for the duration of the war. Kiyo and her family were among the nearly 120,000 internees. In this moving account, Sato and Goldsmith tell the story of the internment years, describing why the internment happened and how it impacted Kiyo and her family. They also discuss the ways in which Kiyo has used her experience to educate other Americans about their history, to promote inclusion, and to fight against similar injustices. Hers is a powerful, relevant, and inspiring story to tell on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.
The twelve essays in this volume underscore the similarities between Chinese and American approaches to bilateral diplomacy and between their perceptions of each other’s policy-making motivations. Much of the literature on U.S.–China relations posits that each side was motivated either by ideologically informed interests or by ideological assumptions about its counterpart. But as these contributors emphasize, newly accessible archives suggest rather that both Beijing and Washington developed a responsive and tactically adaptable foreign policy. Each then adjusted this policy in response to changing international circumstances and changing assessments of its counterpart’s policies. Motivated less by ideology than by pragmatic national security concerns, each assumed that the other faced similar considerations.
In the late 1950s, Washington was driven by its fear of communist subversion: it saw the hand of Kremlin behind developments at home and across the globe. The FBI was obsessed with the threat posed by American communist party--yet party membership had sunk so low, writes H.W. Brands, that it could have fit "inside a high-school gymnasium," and it was so heavily infiltrated that J. Edgar Hoover actually contemplated using his informers as a voting bloc to take over the party. Abroad, the preoccupation with communism drove the White House to help overthrow democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran, and replace them with dictatorships. But by then the Cold War had long since blinded Americans to the ironies of their battle against communism. In The Devil We Knew, Brands provides a witty, perceptive history of the American experience of the Cold War, from Truman's creation of the CIA to Ronald Reagan's creation of SDI. Brands has written a number of highly regarded works on America in the twentieth century; here he puts his experience to work in a volume of impeccable scholarship and exceptional verve. He turns a critical eye to the strategic conceptions (and misconceptions) that led a once-isolationist nation to pursue the war against communism to the most remote places on Earth. By the time Eisenhower left office, the United States was fighting communism by backing dictators from Iran to South Vietnam, from Latin America to the Middle East--while engaging in covert operations the world over. Brands offers no apologies for communist behavior, but he deftly illustrates the strained thinking that led Washington to commit gravely disproportionate resources (including tens of thousands of lives in Korea and Vietnam) to questionable causes. He keenly analyzes the changing policies of each administration, from Nixon's juggling (SALT talks with Moscow, new relations with Ccmmunist China, and bombing North Vietnam) to Carter's confusion to Reagan's laserrattling. Equally important is his incisive, often amusing look at how the anti-Soviet struggle was exploited by politicians, industrialists, and government agencies. He weaves in deft sketches of figures like Barry Goldwater and Henry Jackson (who won a Senate seat with the promise, "Many plants will be converting from peace time to all-out defense production"). We see John F. Kennedy deliver an eloquent speech in 1957 defending the rising forces of nationalism in Algeria and Vietnam; we also see him in the White House a few years later, ordering a massive increase in America's troop commitment to Saigon. The book ranges through the economics and psychology of the Cold War, demonstrating how the confrontation created its own constituencies in private industry and public life. In the end, Americans claimed victory in the Cold War, but Brands's account gives us reason to tone down the celebrations. "Most perversely," he writes, "the call to arms against communism caused American leaders to subvert the principles that constituted their country's best argument against communism." This far-reaching history makes clear that the Cold War was simultaneously far more, and far less, than we ever imagined at the time.
Bringing together leading experts on Korea and US-Korean relations, Divided America, Divided Korea provides a nuanced look at the critical relationship between the US and the two Koreas during and after the Trump years. It considers domestic politics, soft power, human rights, trade, security policy, and more, while integrating the perspectives of those in the US, South and North Korea, Japan, China, and beyond. The authors, ranging from historians and political scientists to policymakers and practitioners, bring a myriad of perspectives and backgrounds to one of the most critical international relationships of the modern world during an unprecedented era of turmoil and change, while also offering critical analyses of the past and present, and somber warnings about the future.
Exploring what we know—and don't know—about how nuclear weapons shape American grand strategy and international relations The world first confronted the power of nuclear weapons when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The global threat of these weapons deepened in the following decades as more advanced weapons, aggressive strategies, and new nuclear powers emerged. Ever since, countless books, reports, and articles—and even a new field of academic inquiry called “security studies”—have tried to explain the so-called nuclear revolution. Francis J. Gavin argues that scholarly and popular understanding of many key issues about nuclear weapons is incomplete at best and wrong at worst. Among these important, misunderstood issues are: how nuclear deterrence works; whether nuclear coercion is effective; how and why the United States chose its nuclear strategies; why countries develop their own nuclear weapons or choose not to do so; and, most fundamentally, whether nuclear weapons make the world safer or more dangerous. These and similar questions still matter because nuclear danger is returning as a genuine threat. Emerging technologies and shifting great-power rivalries seem to herald a new type of cold war just three decades after the end of the U.S.-Soviet conflict that was characterized by periodic prospects of global Armageddon. Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy helps policymakers wrestle with the latest challenges. Written in a clear, accessible, and jargon-free manner, the book also offers insights for students, scholars, and others interested in both the history and future of nuclear danger.
Dandelion Through the Crack: The Sato Family Quest for the American Dream tells of a real Japanese-American family, formed both by ancestry and by the American way of life. We see mother, father, and children, and their challenges over seven decades. There are the extraordinary times of the Depression, wartime emergency, internment in the Poston "relocation" camp in the Arizona desert, oppressive prejudice, and the struggle to recover from near-total loss. But there are also many simple, almost-pastoral moments. The wise fables of the author's father -- tales of his old and new homelands and his haiku poetry -- are interwoven throughout. This is Kiyo Sato's first-person account of the family's struggles and triumphs. The result is a work of literary grace, emotional power, and historical and social importance.
This open access book assesses the profound impact of Japan’s aspirations to become a great power on Japanese security, democracy and foreign relations. Rather than viewing the process of normalization and rejuvenation as two decades of remilitarization in face of rapidly changing strategic environment and domestic political circumstances, this volume contextualizes Japan’s contemporary international relations against the longer grain of Japanese historical interactions. It demonstrates that policies and statecraft in the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s era are a continuation of a long, unbroken and arduous effort by successive generations of leaders to preserve Japanese autonomy, enhance security and advance Japanese national interests. Arguing against the notion that Japan cannot work with China as long as the US-Japan alliance is in place, the book suggests that Tokyo could forge constructive relations with Beijing by engaging China in joint projects in and outside of the Asia-Pacific in issue areas such as infrastructure development or in the provision of international public goods. It also submits that an improvement in Japan-China relations would enhance rather than detract Japan-US relations and that Tokyo will find that her new found autonomy in the US-Japan alliance would not only accord her more political respect and strategic latitude, but also allow her to ameliorate the excesses of American foreign policy adventurism, paving for her to become a truly normal great power.
From 1960s to the early 1970s in East Asia, the Cold War bipolar system, centering on the US and USSR, shifted to a more complicated structure. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Washington and Moscow accelerated the détente process, leading China to fear a "collusion" of the two superpowers. Publicly attacking its former ally while continuing to fight against America, China rose as a symbol of multipolarization in international politics during this era. Focusing on Japan’s policy toward this changing paradigm, Kanda examines Japanese leaders’ perceptions of the international order and how they reacted to this changing international environment. This book moves beyond the traditional Eurocentric view of the Cold War, emphasizing the significant role Japan played. The research provides insight into the foreign policy patterns of post-World War II Japanese diplomacy, particularly in relation to China and the USSR. The investigation relies on careful readings of archival records from Japan, China, Taiwan, the US, the UK, Australia and the UN, published diplomatic documents from France and Germany, and personal papers, diaries and memoirs. This volume will appeal to anyone who is interested in postwar Japan's politics and diplomacy, international history of East Asia, and the Cold War history in general.
This book examines Japan’s nuclear identity and its implications for abolition of nuclear weapons. By applying analytical eclecticism in combination with international relations theory, this book categorizes Japan’s nuclear identity as a ‘nuclear-bombed state’ (classical liberalism), ‘nuclear disarmament state’ (neoliberalism), ‘nuclear-threatened state’ (classical realism), and a ‘nuclear umbrella state’ (neorealism). This research investigates whether the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ‘genocide’ or not, to what degree Japan has contributed to nuclear disarmament, how Japan has been threatened by ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons of North Korea, and how Japan’s security policy has been embedded with the nuclear strategy of the United States. It also sheds light on theoretical factors that Japan does not support the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Finally, this book considers the future of Japan’s nuclear identity and attempts to explore alternatives for Japan’s nuclear disarmament diplomacy toward a world without nuclear weapons.
