More than a decade ago, the current governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, and the late Sony Chairman Akio Morita wrote a best-seller urging their fellow Japanese to just say "No" to the Americans. This was in the context of a wide-ranging trade dispute in which the U.S. was pressuring Japan to curb its exports and allow more U.S. products into Japan. Ishihara and Morita argued that Japan had plenty of potential leverage because it manufactured sophisticated microchips and other products without which the U.S. military arsenal would collapse. I did not think very much of these arguments at the time because I believed (and still believe) that Japan is too dependent on its exports to the U.S. market to risk endangering them. But I agreed with Ishihara and Morita that Japan needed to assert itself more in the very unequal, unbalanced relationship it has had with the United States ever since the Occupation.

This relationship -- which former U.S. Ambassador Mike Mansfield chose to call Washington's "most important, bar none" -- has sometimes been characterized by Japanese as one of "sempai/kohai," with America playing big brother to Japan's junior, tutelary role. When I wrote "MITI and the Japanese Miracle," I argued that this was certainly not the case when it came to economics, where Japan developed a postwar capitalism that for a long time out-produced and outsmarted the U.S.

Nonetheless, Japan continued to pretend it was an American ward, and this infuriated Ishihara as much as it puzzled me. Until, one day, I began to see clearly the link between U.S.' security treaty and its trade policies. After World War II, the U.S. turned Japan into its Cold War satellite, much as the Soviet Union did to the nations of Eastern Europe. U.S. forces continued to occupy Japan. The "nuclear umbrella" still protects Japan, although now that the Soviet Union no longer poses a military threat and North Korea and China are said to be imminent adversaries.