You Only Live Twice (film) manned spacecraft disappear mysteriously in orbit. With each nation blaming the other amidst the Cold War, Bond travels secretly to a remote Japanese island to find the perpetrators and comes face to face with Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the head of SPECTRE. The film reveals the appearance of Blofeld, who was previously a partially unseen character. SPECTRE is working for the government of an unnamed Asian power, implied to be the People's Republic of China, to provoke war between the superpowers. During the filming in Japan, it was announced that Sean Connery would retire from the role of Bond, but after
You Only Live Twice (novel) Sunday Times" in 1959, although his visit only lasted for three days. He returned in 1962 and was accompanied on his trip round the country by Australian friend Richard Hughes and Tiger Saito, both journalists. In "You Only Live Twice", these two characters became Dikko Henderson and Tiger Tanaka, respectively. Hughes was also the model for "Old Craw" in John le Carré's "The Honourable Schoolboy". The novel contains a fictional obituary of Bond, purportedly published in "The Times", which provided details of Bond's early life, although many of these were Fleming's own traits. These included Bond's expulsion from Eton College,