Reassuring Presence: Japanese Assessments of U.S. Power

June 17, 2011

Japan has historically been highly attuned to the distribution of power in the international system. For almost two millennia, Japanese strategy has been to bandwagon with the world’s leading power while seeking greater freedom of maneuver within Asia. Until the eighteenth century that power was China. As the Qing Empire was collapsing at the end of the nineteenth century, Japan aligned with Great Britain in a bilateral alliance from 1902 to 1922. From 1940 to 1945 Japanese strategic thinkers mistakenly assumed that the world’s leading power in the West would be Nazi Germany. Since World War II, Japan has aligned with and accommodated to U.S. global power.