Enigma of U.S.-Japan Relations in the 1950s

Aaron Forsberg. America and the Japanese Miracle: The Cold War Context of Japan's Postwar Economic Revival, 1950-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 336 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

Sayuri Shimizu. Creating People of Plenty: The United States and Japan's Economic Alternatives, 1950-1960. Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2001. viii + 309 pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $32.00.

At first, intellectuals portrayed President Dwight Eisenhower as a dull, ineffective, incompetent president. ¹ In the 1970s and 1980s, revisionists reevaluated the Eisenhower presidency and claimed that Eisenhower executed strong leadership. ² Post-revisionists criticize revisionists for their lack of understanding of Eisenhower's policies toward developing countries. They also argued that the revisionists focused solely on the decision-making style of Eisenhower's foreign policies, neglecting assessment of his policy outcomes. ³

There has been an abundance of historical scholarship on the Eisenhower presidency, but specialists in American foreign policy have paid surprisingly little attention to U.S.-Japan relations in the 1950s. Two very important books have recently been published to fill this void: one from a revisionist and the other from a post-revisionist perspective. Both works are based on meticulous and multi-archival research, making a significant contribution to the study of Eisenhower diplomacy.

America and the Japanese Miracle: The Cold War Context of Japan's Postwar Economic Revival, 1950-1960 by Aaron Forsberg examines U.S.-Japan economic relations in the 1950s from a revisionist perspective. This book indicates that the most serious problem that Japan faced after the end of the occupation was a continuous large trade deficit. The vulnerability of the Japanese economy might harm the U.S.-Japan alliance. Hence, the United States made a deep commitment to Japanese economic recovery. In Washington, Japanese economic recovery became a touchstone for the health of the U.S.-Japan strategic alliance. Japan's miraculous economic development in the 1950s has largely been attributed to domestic factors such as Japan's unique economic system. In contrast, Forsberg insists that external factors, such as U.S. national security policies and intensification of the Cold War played a more significant role than is usually assumed in Japanese economic recovery, integration of Japan into a liberal world trade organization, and development of perennial U.S.-Japan trade friction. According to Forsberg, the Cold War offered Japan favorable international conditions: Japan's economic recovery and the integration of Japan into the Western bloc became major objectives for the United States. Consequently, Washington provided Japan with access to U.S. markets as well as opportunities to transfer technology easily from the United States. Forsberg maintains that without the Cold War, the United States would neither have actively offered such a magnitude of economic assistance to Japan, nor eased Japan's entrance into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, nor opened American markets to Japanese goods, nor permitted Japanese restrictions against imports and investments.

Forsberg demonstrates that because actual Sino-Japanese trade was quite limited, both the Japanese government and the business community relied on trade expansion with the Western liberal trade bloc. However, since the United States imposed severe trade restrictions with the People's Republic of China on Japan, Tokyo, in turn, was able to take advantage of this situation to demand penetration into the world's largest markets—in America.

Trade friction could be interpreted as a serious problem between the United States and Japan, but Forsberg generously argues that the friction came about as a natural consequence of a closer U.S.-Japan alliance and a stronger integration of the Japanese economy into the Western liberal trade bloc. The Eisenhower administration successfully established a close economic relationship with Japan and consolidated the bilateral alliance so that the two countries survived a crisis in 1960 that was brought about by revising the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. According to Forsberg, strong economic relations with...