risis that began in the summer of 1997. In the words of one observer, "from Washington's perspective, the relationship has frayed because Tokyo has failed to keep up its end of an unspoken understanding. The United States guarantees regional security and maintains an open market for exports from the entire region -- Japan included. In turn, Japan should be the locomotive for Asian growth" (Melby, 1998). In the 1970s and 1980s, the pervasive American fear was that the Japanese locomotive would roll over the US economy; now the American concern is that the locomotive is stalled, and liable to be pulled backward.
Other factors influence the relationship, such as Japanese uncertainty regarding US policy toward China (Melby, 1998), or the continuing question of how to deal with North Korea. However, the Japanese-American relationship has for several decades been driven and shaped primarily by economic factors, and the turnabout in the relationship during the Clinton era has been due largely to changes in their respective economic positions -- or, perhaps even more, to changes in the American (if not Japanese) perception of those positions.
The development of the Japanese-American economic relationship since the American occupation after World War II may be divided broadly and conveniently into three periods. The first, from the early 1950s until about 1970, was the period of largely unchallenged American leadership, in which Japan accepted a role as junior partner to the United States, and as an economic force was largely invisible to most Americans. The second, from about 1970 to 1990, was the period of Japanese challenge, marked by increasingly assertive confidence on the part of the Japanese in the superiority of their products, methods, and overall social and economic system, and by growing American public anxiety -- which became acute by about 1880 -- about America's ability to compete with the "new" Japan. The third pe...