The US-China relationship continues to sour under the impact of Covid-19, with the Trump administration threatening to cut all ties with China in a move that would divide the world into two competing trade entities.1 It's been a bad year for China, with accusations over the origins of the pandemic coming on top of China's difficulties in managing the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.2 Under these circumstances, the energy perspective provides a fascinating set of insights into the evolving US-China relationship. The economic havoc unleashed by the Covid-19 pandemic has been bad enough, with reports of looming industry collapse by the International Energy Agency and others.3 But its economic impact has been exacerbated by an ugly price war in the oil industry, seeing prices tumble alongside a collapse in demand. At one point in April, the oil price reached a widely publicised negative level – an unprecedented phenomenon. Now the price is low but at present relatively stable, following a tripartite agreement between the world's three largest oil suppliers – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia. In the last few days, the oil price has recovered to nearly $30 per barrel, providing some modest relief.4 But the impact on the US has been severe, with the high-cost and highly debt-leveraged shale oil industry, which propelled the US to become the world's largest oil producer, facing near collapse. It has long been the goal of both the Saudi and Russian oil industries to damage the upstart US shale industry, which was protected by relatively high oil prices. Now with this protection withdrawn, combined with collapsing demand, the US industry faces severe problems.

In Japan, Covid-19 has led to an accelerating diffusion of all-hazard, disaster-resilient, policy integration. This paper shows that Japanese experts not only built a resource-efficient Covid-19 response, but are also using the crisis to ramp up Japanese-style collaboration on resource-efficient and sustainable communities, both in Japan and overseas. In a year when action on the climate challenge everywhere risks being derailed, Japan's initiatives are an important indicator of how it remains possible to stay on track. Japan's measures further integrate the UN 2030 Agenda's three pillars of the Paris Agreement, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the Sendai Framework of Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR). In short, Japan is using the pandemic as yet another opportunity to accelerate transformative industrial policy.

This excerpt from the author's recent book Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo (Harvard University Press, 2018) describes the dramatic climax of the massive 1960 protests in Japan against the US-Japan Security Treaty (abbreviated Anpo in Japanese), which is the treaty that continues to allow the United States to station troops on Japanese soil to this day. Events described include the May 19th incident, in which Japanese prime minister Kishi Nobusuke shocked the nation by ramming the treaty through the National Diet after having opposition lawmakers physically removed by police; the Hagerty Incident of June 10, in which a car carrying US envoys was mobbed by protesters, necessitating a dramatic rescue by a US Marines helicopter; and the June 15 incident, in which radical student activists forced their way into the National Diet compound, precipitating a bloody battle with police during which a young female university student was killed. Shock at these events accelerated a variety of transformations in US-Japan relations and Japanese politics, society, and culture that continue to shape contemporary Japan and which are described in detail in the book excerpted here.