Japan's remarkable postwar growth spurt in the 1960s would not have been possible without Japan's alliance with the United States. Policy makers, political scientists, economists, historians, and journalists on both sides of the Pacific have made this claim, but no study has yet tested it with modern statistical methods. In this article, we compare the economic growth trajectories of Japan and a statistically constructed “synthetic” Japan, which had a similar profile until the late 1950s but did not experience the consolidation of the US–Japan alliance, a process that began in 1958 and culminated with the signing of a formal defense pact in January 1960. We find that Japan's per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grew much faster than the synthetic Japan's from 1958 to 1968. We substantiate these results with in-depth historical analyses on how the United States facilitated Japan's economic miracle.

Many scholars have suggested that Japan aligned its foreign policy with the US War on Terror. Part of Japan's alignment is said to have involved disbursement of foreign aid to support the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with other security interests associated with the War on Terror. To date, however, there has been little empirical study of this question. Employing a data set on Japanese aid to 133 countries between 1995 and 2008, we examine the War on Terror and Japanese ODA. We find that Japanese aid was aligned with some security interests in the War on Terror, but the effects were mixed.