ĭuring the filming in Japan, it was announced that Sean Connery would retire from the role of Bond, but after one film's absence, he returned in 1971's Diamonds Are Forever and later 1983's non-Eon Bond film Never Say Never Again. 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.

The film reveals the appearance of Blofeld, who was previously only seen from the neck down. 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. In the film, Bond is dispatched to Japan after American and Soviet crewed spacecraft vanish mysteriously in orbit, each nation blaming the other amidst the Cold War. It is the first James Bond film to discard most of Fleming's plot, using only a few characters and locations from the book as the background for an entirely new story. The screenplay of You Only Live Twice was written by Roald Dahl, and loosely based on Ian Fleming's 1964 novel of the same name. It is the first Bond film to be directed by Lewis Gilbert, who later directed the 1977 film The Spy Who Loved Me and the 1979 film Moonraker, both starring Roger Moore. You Only Live Twice is a 1967 spy film and the fifth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, starring Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond.