Japan–United States relations

• 1. Introduction

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  Japan-United States relations began with a show of force. In 1852, Commodore Matthew C. Perry sailed out of Norfolk, Virginia, commanding a squadron of black-hulled steam frigates and warships on a mission to pry open one of the most deliberately closed nations on earth. The Tokugawa shogunate had sealed Japan for more than two centuries under a policy called sakoku, meaning 'chained country.' Foreigners were barred from entering. Japanese citizens were forbidden from leaving. The only exceptions were limited trade with the Dutch and Chinese at the port of Nagasaki.

  When Perry anchored at Uraga Harbor near Edo on the 8th of July 1853, the Japanese military had no realistic way to resist his ships. The 'Black Ships,' as they came to be known, were a symbol that would haunt Japan for generations. Perry returned in March 1854 with twice as many vessels and signed the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Peace and Amity on the 31st of March 1854.

  What followed from that single moment of gunboat diplomacy is one of the most consequential bilateral relationships of the modern era. Two countries that had never met would fight one of history's most devastating wars, then rebuild an alliance so close that by the late 20th century, American officials considered Japan among their very closest partners. How that arc bent from isolation to war to friendship is a story shaped by immigration crises, trade battles, atomic bombs, and the quiet maneuvering of diplomats on both sides. The question that runs beneath all of it is how two nations so deeply different managed, after so much destruction, to find a durable common ground.

• 2. Forced Open

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  Captain James Glynn sailed to Nagasaki in 1848, becoming the first American to negotiate successfully with the sakoku authorities. His recommendation to Congress was straightforward: any future talks with Japan should be backed by a visible display of military power. That advice shaped the orders given to Commodore Perry four years later.

  Perry carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore and had instructions to end Japan's 220-year-old isolation policy by force if necessary. He refused Japanese requests that he leave for Nagasaki, and instead demanded the right to deliver the letter directly, threatening consequences if denied. Japan's ruling shogunate had no equivalent military technology, and they knew it.

  The Dutch, who maintained the only sanctioned Western trading presence in Japan, worked quietly behind the scenes to smooth the negotiations. When Perry returned in March 1854 with a larger fleet, he found the Japanese delegates had already prepared a treaty that met nearly every demand in Fillmore's letter. He signed it on the 31st of March and returned home celebrated as a hero.

  The first American diplomat to follow Perry was Townsend Harris, who served from 1856 to 1861. Born in 1804 and dying in 1878, Harris earned the trust of Japanese leaders to a degree that Perry never had. Japanese officials actually sought his advice on how to handle European powers pressing them for their own agreements. In 1858, Harris concluded a full trade treaty that opened five ports to American residents, set extremely low tariffs that favored American merchants, banned the opium trade, and guaranteed that American citizens in Japan would be tried under American rather than Japanese law. Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Russia rushed to secure similar agreements. The extreme one-sidedness of these treaties fed domestic unrest inside Japan, and contributed to the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate just ten years after Harris's treaty was signed.

• 3. Goodwill Before the Fall

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  From as early as 1879, a generation of influential Japanese statesmen worked deliberately to build friendship with the United States. Prince Iesato Tokugawa, who lived from 1863 to 1940, and Baron Eiichi Shibusawa, who lived from 1840 to 1931, led a sustained effort across decades to promote mutual respect between the two nations. Their network reached seven American presidents: Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Theodore Roosevelt himself regarded maintaining friendly relations with Japan as one of his highest priorities during his presidency. Charles Neu, assessing Roosevelt's record, described a largely successful policy grounded in political realities and a firm belief that friendship with Japan was essential to protecting American interests in the Pacific. That friendship was tested repeatedly. Anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast, particularly in California, created repeated crises. In 1907, there was widespread speculation in Europe, the United States, and Japan that war between the two countries was imminent. Roosevelt received repeated warnings from authoritative sources that conflict was close.

  Rather than escalate, Roosevelt dispatched the Great White Fleet to Japan in 1908. The British ambassador in Tokyo watched Japanese officers and men receive the fleet and reported back to London that the visit had produced a marked and favorable impression and had put an end to what he called 'nonsensical war talk.' In 1912, the people of Japan sent 3,020 cherry trees to the United States as a gift of friendship. First Lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, planted the first two trees together on the northern bank of the Tidal Basin. Those two original trees are still standing.

  But the goodwill rested on a fragile foundation. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which prohibited further immigration from Japan entirely. The source text describes this as a turning point: the signing of that law by President Calvin Coolidge, combined with the passing of the older generation of diplomats and humanitarians, gave Japanese militarists the opening they needed to gain control and push Japan toward the Axis.

• 4. The Road to Pearl Harbor

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  Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931 drew strong objections from the League of Nations, Britain, and especially the United States. By 1937, Japanese forces had taken control of the main cities on China's east coast, again over strong American protests. American public and elite opinion, including even the isolationists who opposed intervention in Europe, strongly opposed Japan's invasion of China.

  President Franklin Roosevelt imposed increasingly stringent economic sanctions intended to cut off the oil and steel Japan needed for its military operations in China. Japan was extraordinarily vulnerable to such pressure: it depended on imports for over 90% of its oil, with 80% of that coming from the United States. By the time the United States enforced the Export Control Act in July 1940, Japan had stockpiled around 54 million barrels of oil. Washington imposed a full oil embargo in July 1941. Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands together froze all Japanese assets and cut off oil shipments.

  Japanese diplomats arrived in Washington in the summer of 1941 for high-level negotiations, but they did not speak for the Army leadership, who held actual decision-making power. By early October, both sides concluded that compromise was not feasible. Japan's determination to hold China and America's commitment to defend it left no middle ground.

  The Japanese military calculated that a decisive strike against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor might bring the United States to the negotiating table before American industrial capacity could be brought to bear. Some admirals and the civilian prime minister Konoe Fumimaro believed that a war with the United States would end in defeat. They were overruled. On the 7th of December 1941, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The United States declared war the next day.

• 5. Pacific War and Occupation

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  Japan's initial advance across the Pacific was sweeping. Hong Kong, the Malayan Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and other Western colonial territories fell in rapid succession. But the advance stalled in May 1942. Allied forces repulsed a Japanese naval task force at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and in June 1942, the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered what the source describes as a catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Midway, effectively ending Japanese expansion in the Pacific.

  America's industrial capacity proved the decisive factor as the war progressed. By 1945, a long campaign of island hopping had pushed Japan's defensive perimeter back to Okinawa, just 400 miles from the Japanese mainland. American aircraft conducted sustained bombardment of Japanese cities. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan in accordance with the Tehran Conference, invading Japanese-held territory in Korea and Manchuria. The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender on the 15th of August 1945. The official Instrument of Surrender was signed on the 2nd of September.

  What followed was seven years of American military occupation, led by General Douglas MacArthur under the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers. The scope of the transformation was extraordinary. Occupation authorities pressured Emperor Hirohito to renounce his divinity, disbanded the Japanese military, dissolved the massive zaibatsu industrial conglomerates, carried out extensive land reform, legalized labor unions and the Japan Communist Party, and gave women the right to vote. A brand new Japanese constitution was written from scratch by Occupation authorities, translated into Japanese, and passed by the Japanese Diet. Article 9 of that constitution expressly forbade Japan from maintaining an offensive military.

  As the Cold War deepened, American priorities shifted. Beginning in 1947, occupation authorities began rolling back many of the changes they had just implemented, in what became known as the Reverse Course. In 1950, they collaborated with Japanese conservatives to carry out a massive purge of tens of thousands of communists, socialists, and suspected sympathizers from government, schools, universities, and large corporations. The occupation ended in 1952 with the San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on the 8th of September 1951 and taking effect on the 28th of April 1952. As a condition of restored sovereignty, Japan signed the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, entering a military alliance with the United States.

• 6. Alliance Under Strain

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  The original 1952 Security Treaty established the alliance but put Japan on terms the Japanese government found humiliating: no specified end date, no means of abrogation, and provisions allowing American forces to suppress domestic disturbances inside Japan. Protests erupted on the 1st of May 1952, just days after the treaty came into force, turning violent in Tokyo in what came to be remembered as 'Bloody May Day.'

  The ongoing presence of American military bases generated a growing protest movement through the 1950s. Anti-U.S. sentiment intensified after the Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident in 1954, when a U.S. nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll rained radioactive fallout on a Japanese fishing vessel, an event that directly inspired the original Godzilla film. In 1957, an off-duty American soldier shot and killed a Japanese housewife in what became known as the Girard Incident. The Eisenhower administration eventually agreed to revise the treaty and substantially reduce its troop presence, cutting from 210,000 soldiers in 1953 to 48,000 by 1960.

  The revised treaty, known in Japanese as 'Anpo,' was signed by Eisenhower and Prime Minister Kishi on the 19th of January 1960 in Washington. Despite being a genuine improvement over the original, the treaty triggered the largest protests in Japan's modern history. On the 19th of May 1960, Kishi had opposition lawmakers physically removed from the Diet by police and pushed through ratification with only his own Liberal Democratic Party present. The protests escalated dramatically. At their climax on the 15th of June, a violent clash at the Diet led to the death of a female university student, Michiko Kanba. Eisenhower's planned visit was cancelled. Kishi resigned.

  The Kennedy administration worked to repair the damage. President Kennedy appointed Harvard professor and Japan expert Edwin O. Reischauer as ambassador, a choice that signaled a different approach. Reischauer visited 39 of Japan's 47 prefectures on a nationwide listening tour and made 'equal partnership' the defining phrase of his tenure, which lasted until 1966. Kennedy and Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda held a summit in Washington in 1961, with Ikeda becoming the first foreign leader to visit the United States during Kennedy's term. Kennedy promised to treat Japan more like a close ally such as Great Britain.

• 7. Economic Rivalry and Recovery

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  Japan reversed its trade imbalance with the United States in 1965, achieving an export surplus for the first time. From that point, the ever-widening American trade deficit with Japan became a central source of friction. Japanese automobiles and consumer electronics proved especially popular in the American market, and Japan climbed to become the world's second largest economy after the United States, a position it held until 2010, when it dropped to third place behind China.

  In July 1971, the Japanese government was caught completely off guard by Nixon's announcement of his forthcoming visit to China, a fundamental shift in American foreign policy made without any prior consultation with Tokyo. The following month came another shock: Nixon imposed a 10% surcharge on imports and suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold, moves explicitly aimed at hindering Japan's exports. The resulting decoupling of the yen and dollar caused the yen to soar in value, damaging Japan's trade and economic outlook. These events, known collectively as the Nixon Shocks, marked the beginning of a new era of economic rivalry alongside the continuing security alliance.

  In 1981, Japanese automakers agreed to voluntary export restraints limiting them to 1.68 million cars per year exported to the United States. One unintended consequence was that Japanese manufacturers began developing luxury car divisions with higher profit margins, including Toyota's Lexus, Honda's Acura, and Nissan's Infiniti. Another was that the three largest Japanese automakers all opened production facilities inside the United States by 1985, placing them primarily in southern states with right-to-work laws.

  The trade tensions peaked when the U.S. Senate voted 92-0 in March 1985 in favor of a resolution condemning Japan's trade practices as 'unfair.' On the 22nd of September 1985, finance ministers from the G-5 nations met at the Plaza Hotel in New York and reached an agreement to coordinate intervention in currency markets to depreciate the dollar and appreciate the Japanese yen. Through this period, Japanese government and private investors held a third of the debt sold by the U.S. Treasury during Reagan's first term, providing Americans with currency used to buy Japanese goods, a circular arrangement that illustrated how thoroughly the two economies had become entangled.

• 8. Durable Partnership

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  Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone's election in late 1982 opened a new chapter in the personal dimension of the alliance. Nakasone and Reagan developed a close working relationship grounded in shared views on security and international affairs. At the 1983 G7 summit in Williamsburg, Nakasone backed Reagan's decision to deploy Pershing II missiles in Europe, a significant gesture of solidarity on a contentious issue.

  The Yoshida Doctrine, named for Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who served from 1948 to 1954, provided the strategic framework that made the postwar partnership work. Japan allied firmly with the United States in the Cold War, relied on American military strength and kept its own defense forces minimal, and concentrated on economic diplomacy. The doctrine, whose actual term was coined in 1977, shaped Japanese foreign policy well into the 21st century.

  Public opinion on both sides of the relationship has remained broadly positive into the contemporary period. According to public opinion surveys cited in the source, Japanese respondents have a generally favorable view of the United States, while Americans hold an overwhelmingly positive view of Japan. U.S. government officials generally consider Japan to be one of their closest allies and partners.

  The history of Japan-United States relations encompasses forced opening by gunboat, a catastrophic war, and a remarkable reconstruction of both a nation and an alliance. The cherry trees first planted by First Lady Helen Herron Taft and Viscountess Chinda on the northern bank of the Tidal Basin in 1912 are still standing today, on a stretch of ground that became, in the words of those who planted them, a symbol of the friendship the two nations chose to build.