Japan–United States relations
bilateral relations between Japan and the United States
International relations between Japan and the United States began in the late 18th and early 19th century with the 1852–1855 diplomatic but force-backed missions of U.S. ship captains James Glynn and Matthew C. Perry to the Tokugawa shogunate. Following the Meiji Restoration, the countries maintained relatively cordial relations. Potential disputes were resolved. Japan acknowledged American control of Hawaii and the Philippines, and the United States reciprocated regarding Korea. Disagreements about Japanese immigration to the U.S. were resolved in 1907. The two were allies against Germany in World War I.
From as early as 1879 and continuing through most of the first four decades of the 20th century, influential Japanese statesmen such as Prince Iesato Tokugawa (1863–1940) and Baron Eiichi Shibusawa (1840–1931) led a major Japanese domestic and international movement advocating goodwill and mutual respect with the United States. Their friendship with the U.S. included allying with seven U.S. presidents – Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Hoover, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was only after the passing of this older generation of diplomats and humanitarians, along with the evidence that many Americans believed all Asians to be alike with President Calvin Coolidge's signing of the Immigration Act of 1924 that Japanese militarists were able to gain control and pressure Japan into joining with the Axis powers in World War II.
Starting in 1931, tensions escalated. Japanese actions against China in 1931 and especially after 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War caused the United States to cut off the oil and steel Japan required for their military conquests. Japan responded with attacks on the Allies, including the attack on Pearl Harbor, which heavily damaged the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, opening the Pacific theater of World War II. The United States made a massive investment in naval power and systematically destroyed Japan's offensive capabilities while island hopping across the Pacific.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Japan–United States relations” as bilateral relations between Japan and the United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1227243. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1852, 1855, 1907 and 1879.
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This entry incorporates text from “Japan–United States relations” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.