戦後日本の対米外交に於ける非正式接触者

日本外交の非正式チャンネル

抄録

Because Japan in the postwar years has maintained friendly relations with the United States, it has been said that formal channels of communications between the two governments have solved major issues, thus limiting the room for informal contact-makers to play a role. Yet a study of major diplomatic disputes reveals the contrary.
For the conclusion of the Mutual Security Treaty of 1951, Finance Minister Ikeda Hayato, who went to Washington as Premier Yoshida Shigeru's special envoy, and another Yoshida confident, Shirasu Jiro, together played an important role, behind the scenes, in arranging for the terms under which the U. S. troops would remain in Japan afer sovereignty was regained. From the late 1960s until the early 1970s there emerged two large political issues, Okinawa and textiles, which contributed to the “Nixon shocks” of 1971. To solve the two issues at one time, Prime Minister Sato Eisaku made a personal confidential commitment to President Nixon to the effect that Tokyo would restrict its textile exports to the United States in exchange for the latter returning Okinawa. This secret commitment was arranged between the President's special assistant, Henry Kissinger, and Sato's personal emissary, Wakaizumi Kei, a college professor.
In the second half of the 1970s the two nations began to face more serious economic conflicts than theretofore. Such conflicts, complicating the interests of different economic groups and sectors in each country, have encouraged informal contact-makers to become active in attempts to ensure the reflection of private interests in their respective governments' foreign policies, as was observed in the binational negotiations on citrus fruits in 1977-80. In the 1980s, a new type of informal contact-maker has emerged. A chief of a section of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), for example, secretly tried to manipulate behind the scenes the intense automobile talks of 1980 so that Japan could solve the issue by restricting its automobile exports to the United States. He did not do so due to his own personal ambition but out of his criticism of the unproductive formal diplomatic channels, which produced only inflexible, stiff negotiating attitudes on both sides.