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Japan Foreign Affairs
Japan's biggest postwar political crisis took place in
1960
over the revision of the Japan-United States Mutual
Security
Assistance Pact. As the new Treaty of Mutual Cooperation
and
Security was concluded, which renewed the United States
role as
military protector of Japan, massive street protests and
political
upheaval occurred, and the cabinet resigned a month after
the
Diet's ratification of the treaty. Thereafter, political
turmoil
subsided. Japanese views of the United States, after years
of mass
protests over nuclear armaments and the mutual defense
pact,
improved by 1972, with the reversion of United
States-occupied
Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty and the winding down of
the Second
Indochina War (1954-75).
Japan had reestablished relations with the Republic of
China
after World War II, and cordial relations were maintained
with the
nationalist government when it was exiled to Taiwan, a
policy that
won Japan the enmity of the People's Republic of China,
which was
established in 1949. After the general warming of
relations between
China and Western countries, especially the United States,
which
shocked Japan with its sudden rapprochement with Beijing
in 1971,
Tokyo established relations with Beijing in 1972. Close
cooperation
in the economic sphere followed
(see Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
, ch. 5;
Relations with China
, ch. 7).
Japan's relations with the Soviet Union continued to be
problematic long after the war. The main object of dispute
was the
Soviet occupation of what Japan calls its Northern
Territories, the
two most southerly islands in the Kurils (Etorofu and
Kunashiri)
and Shikotan and the Habomai Islands (northeast of
Hokkaido), which
were seized by the Soviet Union in the closing days of
World War II
(see Relations with Russia
, ch. 7).
Data as of January 1994
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