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regarding Soviet power as the only major threat to all the great benefits they now enjoy. Americans therefore tend to concentrate all their attention on this one issue and to view the many other problems of the world largely in terms of how they bear on the single great American concern.
To the Japanese, whose position vis-a-vis the Communists is much more precarious, the Communist menace appears less serious because they have less to lose to it and also because they are aware of other sources of danger to their future well-being which they feel to be comparable and possibly even greater than that of Communism. Japan's grim race between births and economic expansion looms larger to most Japanese than does Communist imperialism. Politically, many Japanese regard Communism as perhaps the lesser of two threats to democracy; the other being, in their view, the domestic totalitarian right. Where the United States is determined to take no avoidable risks with Communism, the Japanese believe that, faced as they are by many serious problems, they will have to take many chances and that taking chances with the external Communist threat may not be as hazardous as taking chances in some other fields.
Another difference in approach, though again not in objectives, between the United States and Japan is occasioned by the very unequal nature of their cooperation. Japan is dependent on substantial economic and military support from the United States, and for this reason the latter inevitably has considerable positive control even over a theoretically independent Japan. Japan in return has little capacity to influence, much less control, the United States. The best Japan can hope to contribute in the near future to this unequal partnership is an increasing share of its own economic and military support. Its powers of influencing the United States are purely negative, being limited for the most part to the possibility of proving noncooperative in American efforts to give economic aid and military support to Japan and surrounding areas.
Somewhat the same situation exists between the United States and its allies in Europe, but in Japan it is more acute, since the inequalities are greater and have been emphasized by six years of occupation. Unless carefully handled, this inequality of status between friends could lead to a domineering attitude on the part of Americans which would antagonize and alienate potential support in Japan, and at the same time it could produce a negative, uncooperative attitude on the part of the Japanese which would seriously limit the possibilities for a fruitful relationship. While Japanese and American interests and objectives today appear to be thoroughly compatible and the occupation has left a continuing pattern of external friendship and close cooperation, such discrepancies in status between the United States and Japan, when added to the difference in attitude which they bring to their common objectives, could produce enough friction to nullify their efforts at cooperation or even persuade them that their interests are too divergent to permit friendly relations.
This basic identity of interests but substantial disagreement over emphases between the United States and Japan becomes apparent as soon as one examines the chief areas of cooperation and dispute between the two countries. These fall roughly into two distinct but related categories--economic problems and those
