Introduction: The Strategic Context of US-Japan Trade Friction

Abstract

Since 1980, the fabric of relations between Japan and the United States has been strained by tensions arising from a variety of longstanding and recently intensifying bilateral issues. In particular, tensions have been heightened by the rapid escalation of the bilateral trade imbalance, and this development has added fuel to the longstanding debate over defence burden sharing that has percolated just below the surface of US-Japan relations since the early 1950s. Public concern and political tensions over these two closely intertwined issues have been further intensified by fundamental shifts under way in the economic and strategic environment of the Asian-Pacific region. China’s domestic reforms and its increasing involvement in the international economy, the rise of the ‘Four Tigers’ (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) as industrial powers in world markets, and the evidence of ‘new thinking’ in Gorbachev’s more accommodative approach to Asia generally and China and Japan specifically all combine to present the US-Japan partnership with the prospect of dramatic shifts in the structure of the strategic environment that defines the raison d’etre of their longstanding security alliance.