Kennedy remonstrated, “This is not true in many other countries . . . would it be possible for somebody in a Communist country to get up and oppose the government of that country?” He told the crowd, “I am visiting Japan to learn and find out from young people such as yourselves what your views are as far as Japan is concerned and as far as the future of the world is concerned.” After his remarks Kennedy took questions from the audience, and people responded positively. Susie Wilson commented, “He told them, ‘Come up here, and let me hear your concerns.’ It was the very essence of democracy.”

As the event was winding down, a student, the school cheerleader, shouted from the back of the auditorium his apologies for the treatment of the attorney general and his desire to make amends. Bounding onstage, he led the audience in a thundering rendition of the Waseda school song, “Miyako No Seihoku.” The group’s interpreter hastily scratched out a transliteration; Ethel, Reischauer, Seigenthaler and the rest of the entourage crowded around the attorney general and sang along exuberantly. Brandon Grove, a U.S. diplomat, recalled, “Each verse ended in shouts of ‘Waseda! Waseda! Waseda!’ and there’s where we excelled.”

The cheerleader, energetically gesticulating as he led the song, inadvertently punched Ethel Kennedy in the stomach, leading her to double over and stumble over a chair. Ethel immediately stood up and grinned as if nothing had happened. “She came from a huge family with plenty of touch football,” recalled Susie Wilson. “I don’t think it affected her at all.”

Fifty years later, reminiscing about the visit to Waseda, John Seigenthaler volunteered to sing its school song. He proudly sang multiple verses of scratchy, Nashville-accented Japanese. “That song,” he said, “turned the event into a stunning victory.” Anthony Lewis, covering the trip for the New York Times, recalled later that, although he’d been ill the night of the Waseda event, he’d had to learn the song because the group took to performing it at receptions and other events on the trip. (Lewis, too, offered up several bars of “Waseda!Waseda!Waseda!”)

Robert and Ethel would sing the song again at another Waseda event, when they returned to the university in 1964. Over the years, the family serenaded startled guests with the song at Hickory Hill. And in 1968, on the campaign trail in San Francisco, a giddy and exhausted trio of Kennedy, Ethel and Seigenthaler belted out “Miyako No Seihoku” while driving toward the airport, en route to the probable Democratic presidential nomination and an assassin’s bullet.

On their TV sets that evening, the Japanese watched what Reischauer called “one of the most dramatic live TV programs in history.” Though the auditorium’s microphones were dead, Kennedy could see that the TV microphones had remained on, so he knew he was speaking to the entire nation. The Japanese watched their young people heckling an invited, globally renowned dignitary and saw him respond with composure and respect. The scene was mortifying: legendary as attentive hosts, the Japanese had failed spectacularly. Kennedy later said he was surprised at the impact of the incident; Reischauer agreed, noting, “At the time, we did not realize what a tremendous victory we had just had.” The rest of the visit was a triumph.

Kennedy’s visit, coupled with the efforts of Reischauer and other committed leaders on both sides, heralded a new era in U.S.-Japanese relations. Reischauer had bonded with the attorney general, which gave him a direct line to the president—something that would prove invaluable in the ambassador’s struggles with the military. “When Caraway started attacking Reischauer,” Ernest Young noted, “the ambassador could resort to this backchannel through Bobby. He used it to save himself from political assassination from the Department of the Army.” In April 1962, President Kennedy announced for the first time that Okinawa would eventually be returned to Japan, implemented several reforms giving the Okinawan people greater autonomy and bolstered social programs on the neglected island. Although Kennedy’s assassination delayed the return, his policy ultimately was achieved ten years later.

After Robert Kennedy’s visit, the RK committee grew into a number of activities and institutions designed to foster an alliance between peoples rather than governments. It created a forum for bilateral dialogue called the Shimoda Conferences, named after that Japanese seaside town. At the initial meeting in 1967, more than seventy Japanese and American politicians, industrialists and academics discussed bilateral relations. Several American participants remarked that they had been shocked at the “passion” among their Japanese counterparts on the issue of Okinawa, which had received little attention in the United States.

Additionally, President Kennedy and Hayato Ikeda had at their 1961 summit initiated cabinet-level exchanges in the realms of the economy, scientific cooperation, and cultural and educational exchange. The delegation on the economy, chaired by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, met for the first time in Hakone, a town famous for its hot springs; the latter became formalized as the U.S.-Japan Conference on Culture and Educational Interchange (CULCON). CULCON aimed to broaden U.S.-Japanese relations beyond the political and military realms. Participants in its 1962 meeting (among them composer Aaron Copland) agreed on the need for language education and urged the creation of exchanges among artists, sculptors, writers and musicians. CULCON continues today.

Over the years, interlocutors became colleagues; colleagues became friends. The conferences were frequent, the beer cold, the conversations frank. U.S. and LDP alliance managers grew comfortable with one another—too comfortable. Forgetting that the LDP might not be in power forever, the Americans neglected to invite the Japanese opposition to the hot springs too. Former State Department official Richard Armitage lamented the American failure to “spread our network enough.” Observes George Packard, “The dirty little secret was that the United States got used to dealing with the LDP all of those years. The White House, the State Department—no one had developed any ties with any of the political opposition in Japan.” Packard adds, “This is something Reischauer would have abhorred.”

In 2009, Japanese voters upended fifty years of conservative rule, tossed the LDP out of office and installed the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ had no experience governing and little expertise in foreign affairs. Its new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, had declared during his campaign that he wanted to create “a more equal alliance” with the United States and, ominously, “equidistance” between Washington and Beijing. Hatoyama withdrew Japanese participation in naval operations supporting the United States in the Indian Ocean, began cozying up to Beijing with talk of an “East Asian community,” and opened an investigation into shady agreements in the 1950s and 1960s between the LDP and Washington regarding the stationing of nuclear weapons.

The DPJ’s ascent discombobulated the U.S.-Japanese relationship. As U.S. alliance managers tried to figure out the post-LDP world, they had no one to call. All they had were their friends in Japan’s bureaucracy whom they’d cultivated over decades of delegations, dialogues and beer-soaked retreats. But their friends were on the outside too. Viewed by the distrustful DPJ as LDP minions, the bureaucrats had been benched by the Hatoyama government.

Unease turned to crisis when Hatoyama announced plans to scrap an agreement about restructuring U.S. bases on Okinawa. The deal, fourteen years in the making, was viewed by alliance managers as essential for maintaining the U.S.-Japanese security partnership. A key element of the agreement was the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma because of the threat of accidents to the densely populated Ginowan city in which it sat. The plan was to relocate the base in Okinawa to Camp Schwab, near Nago City. But Hatoyama declared he wanted to move the Marines off Okinawa altogether.

Horrified alliance managers on both sides scrambled to repair the damage. As East Asia was rocked by crisis—shrill Chinese diplomacy in a 2010 standoff over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands and North Korean attacks against South Korea—the DPJ was forced rapidly up its foreign-policy learning curve. The DPJ reined in the movement to distance Japan from the United States. It ushered Hatoyama out as if he were an uncle clutching a scotch and braying inappropriate remarks at a wedding. A new DPJ prime minister, Naoto Kan, smoothly took up the microphone: ladies and gentlemen, please excuse the disruption and return to your dessert. The Futenma deal was back on track.

Thus, the crisis in the alliance eased, and subsequent events only made the Japanese people more receptive to arguments about the need for a strong U.S.-Japanese alliance (and for the Futenma relocation to go forward). After the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, the Japanese public witnessed an American outpouring of sympathy, aid and emergency assistance. And the following year, as Japan’s leaders and people watched Chinese mobs burn and loot Japanese businesses amid expressions of genocidal rhetoric, Japanese fears of China soared. Japanese politicians now compete to outdo one another as the toughest on China and the ablest manager of U.S.-Japanese relations.