In the post-war period the number of issues that demanded the foreign secretary's attention escalated prodigiously. Accordingly the time that any of the incumbents could allocate to overseeing relations with countries on a day-to-day basis dwindled away. It is therefore much more difficult for the years after 1945 to talk about how any individual foreign secretary put his own particular stamp on relations with Japan,which was, after all, a country that did not loom large in the British imagination as hitherto now that the empire in Asia was very largely a thing of the past. One exception to this rule is Lord Home (Sir Alec Douglas-Home). In his two periods of office (1960–63 under Harold Macmillan and then 1970–74 under Edward Heath), Home saw more clearly than most that Britain could not afford to neglect its relations with Japan and therefore took a number of significant steps to work for their improvement, while at the same time encouraging other government departments to consider what they could to assist.

HOME AT THE FOREIGN OFFICE, 1960–63

Alec Douglas-Home was born in 1903. He came from a prominent Scottish aristocratic family and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He entered politics as a Conservative MP in 1931 and famously served as parliamentary private secretary to the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, between 1937 and 1940. In 1951 he succeeded to the peerage as the fourteenth Earl of Home and served in a number of cabinet posts under Macmillan before becoming foreign secretary in October 1960. Home entered the Foreign Office at an important time for Anglo-Japanese relations as 1960, for a number of reasons, concentrated attention on the future of Japan. The most obvious factor was that the summer of 1960 witnessed large-scale demonstrations in Tokyo and other cities against the ratification of a new security treaty with the United States. These disturbances caused the cancellation of a state visit by the American President, Dwight Eisenhower, and eventually the resignation of the Japanese prime minister, Kishi Nobusuke. This tide of unrest led to concern in Whitehall because it raised the spectre of Japan possibly moving towards a more neutralist stance in international affairs.