The other transpacific alliances: introduction

Abstract

The US-Japan security alliance and "other" activist alliances The collection of articles in this Special Issue originated in a panel at the 2016 Association for Asian Studies in Asia conference, held at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. Their collective goal was to offer fine-grained analyses of "other transpacific alliances" that formed within and against the US-Japan political and military alliance in the 1960s. Together, they explore the sites at which people with different experiences and histories came into contact and forged shared critiques of the Cold War policies of the United States and Japan. US geopolitical ambitions in Asia depended on the intimate post-WWII US-Japan relationship, forged during the Allied Occupation of Japan. John Dower has described how Japanese political elites "embraced" many programs introduced by the United States during this period. 1 After the Occupation, the two countries were more formally tethered by the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, signed in 1952. This treaty set the tenor of the post-Occupation relationship between the two nations, including obligations for mutual defense that allowed US military forces to remain in Japanese territories. Establishing and expanding US military bases entailed the violence of land dispossessionsometimes by means of violence-and base culture around US military bases in the Japanese archipelago (and mostly in Okinawa, which was under US military governance). Those bases, in turn, were staging areas for US wars in Asia, principally in Vietnam. Fuel and personnel travelled across Japan to support US military objectives. A 1966 report to the military preparedness subcommittee of the Senate declared that "it would be very difficult to fight the war in Southeast Asia" without the US naval bases at Yokosuka and Sasebo. 2 From 1968 onward, B-52 bombers took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa to bomb Southeast Asia. About 50,000 US troops remained stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War. 3 Such military activities made the aggressive nature of US policies, and the price of Japan's "cooperation, " readily apparent to many Japanese citizens.