Along with plunging stock prices and the faltering United States financial system, the US decision this weekend to remove its terrorism support label from North Korea could go down as the “Bush Shock” in the modern history of Japan. While the world's attention was mainly focused on the Group of Seven finance ministers and central bankers' meeting in Washington, the George W Bush administration removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism—somehow discreetly. To Japan, it compared unfavorably with the so-called “Nixon Shock” of the 1970s when then-President Richard Nixon, without telling Tokyo, the US’s most important ally in Asia, announced that he was granting diplomatic recognition to Japan’s then-enemy, the Communist regime in China.