Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 626, An Ocean Between Us, Part 3.

To say that the 1980s were not a particularly great time in American manufacturing, would, if anything, be a bit of an understatement.

The great hollowing out of American industry, which began in the 1960s and 1970s, with the first

attempts at offshoring, had picked up speed with the advent of modern telecommunications,

which allowed companies to distribute operations over the whole world more efficiently,

and with modern free trade agreements, the most controversial of which, of course, was

NAFTA, the North American

free trade agreement.

The espoused goal was to save companies money and reduce prices for end consumers, and I think

it's fair to say there's no doubt this has worked, but of course there has been a price to pay

for this as well, particularly in towns heavily dependent on manufacturing

as those jobs left the United States for other parts of the world.

That moment also coincided with a very tense period in U.S.-Japan relations specifically.

It's been almost 40 years now, so it's a bit hard to remember just how much that relationship,

which after World War II had been a very unequal one favoring the U.S. had flipped on its head by the late 80s.

At the end of the American occupation of Japan after World War II, the U.S. government tended to

treat Japan almost as a vassal state,

embodied by the deeply unequal military alliance foisted on Japan as a condition for ending the occupation

in 1952. That treaty, among other things, gave the U.S. the right to use its bases in Japan for

any purpose whatsoever without informing the Japanese government in advance.

By the 1960s, the relationship had become more equal, thanks in large part to shifts on the

American side, as diplomats realized how much unnecessary tension that overbearing treatment was creating.

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