Bilateral relations between Japan and the United States during the four years Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been in office have often been characterized as a "honeymoon."
Koizumi was one of the first leaders to give President George W. Bush his all-out support for the U.S.-led war on Iraq and sent the Self-Defense Forces to Iraq on a humanitarian mission.
But Japan's relationships with its East Asian neighbors, however, namely China and South Korea, are at their worst in decades due to the uproar over history textbooks that critics say gloss over its wartime aggression and the prime minister's repeated visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which honors the nation's war dead, including Class-A war criminals.