Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 69, an Unnatural Intimacy, Part 7.

We last left things in the 1980s, when the U.S.-Japan relationship was fairly stable,

but was becoming increasingly less so.

Japan's massive economic growth had made it the second largest economic power on earth,

and as a result there was a growing sentiment both in the Japanese leadership and the public at large

that the Japanese relationship with the U.S. was too subservient.

It was not the kind of relationship that two powerful independent states should have with each other,

but the kind where one state

with power dictated terms to one state without it. Some of this was wrapped up in rather unpleasant

nationalistic sentiment on the Japanese part, but there were also a good number of people who were

simply tired of being a first world country that was treated like a client state.

The strange bedfellows such attitudes made for are best evidenced by the 1989 book,

No Toyero Nihon, the Japan that Can Say No,

which was co-written by, and I don't want to sound judgy here,

ultranationalist wingnut and future mayor of Tokyo,

Ishihara Shinkaro,

though at the time he was just Minister of Transport,

and the moderate businessman and founder of Sony, Morita Akio.

The parts written by Ishihara and Morita read like two different books.

They each wrote their own separate parts.

Ishihara made a few decent points, for example about American arrogance when dealing with foreigners,

and then turned around and started saying some crazy stuff, as he always does.

...