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
James Bond (literary character) and one short story in the life of a young James Bond; his final work was the short story "A Hard Man to Kill", released as part of the non-fiction work, "", the companion book to the Young Bond series. Young Bond is set in the 1930s, which would fit the chronology with that of Fleming. Higson stated that he was instructed by the Fleming estate to ignore all other interpretations of Bond, except the original Fleming version. As the background to Bond's childhood, Higson used Bond's obituary in "You Only Live Twice" as well as his own and Fleming's