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.

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.

While attending a sumo tournament, Bond is approached by female Japanese secret service agent Aki, who takes him to meet local MI6 operative Dikko Henderson.

The mysterious spaceship lands in a base hidden inside the volcano, operated by Ernst Stavro Blofeld of SPECTRE, who has been hired by a great power to start a Soviet-American war.

Bond locates and frees the captured American and Soviet astronauts and, with their help, steals a space suit to infiltrate the SPECTRE spacecraft, "Bird One".

Bond fights his way back to the control room, kills Blofeld's bodyguard Hans, and activates Bird One's self-destruct before it reaches the American capsule.

Bond, Kissy, Tanaka, and the surviving ninjas leave before the eruption destroys the base, and are picked up by the Japanese Maritime Forces and the British Secret Service.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service was the intended next film after Thunderball (1965), but the producers decided to adapt You Only Live Twice instead because OHMSS would require searching for high and snowy locations.

[7] Lewis Gilbert originally declined the offer to direct, but accepted after producer Albert R. Broccoli called him saying: "You can't give up this job.

[9] Gilbert, Young, producers Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, and production designer Ken Adam then went to Japan, spending three weeks searching for locations.

[14] He was inspired by the story of a missing nuclear-armed U.S. Air Force bomber over Spain and by the Soviet Union and the United States' recent first spacewalks from Voskhod 2 and Gemini 4.

[17] Gilbert was mostly collaborative with Dahl's work, as the writer declared: "He not only helped in script conferences, but had some good ideas and then left you alone, and when you produced the finished thing, he shot it.

Sean Connery had stated that he was tired of playing James Bond and all of the associated commitment (time spent filming and publicising each movie), together with finding it difficult to do other work, which would potentially lead to typecasting.

UA CEO Bud Ornstein met with Toshiro Mifune in the Canary Islands to try to convince him to play Tiger Tanaka, but he was already committed to appear in Grand Prix.

Akiko Wakabayashi and Mie Hama, both Toho Studios stars, were eventually chosen and started taking English classes in the UK.

[28] The sets of SPECTRE's volcano base, including operative heliport and monorail, were constructed at a lot inside Pinewood Studios, at a cost of $1 million.

[29] Locations outside Japan included using the Royal Navy frigate HMS Tenby, then in Gibraltar, for the sea burial,[30] Hong Kong for the scene where Bond fakes his death, and Norway for the Soviet radar station.

[citation needed] The movie soundtrack song is widely recognised for its striking opening bars and oriental flavour, and was far more popular on radio.

[44] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, in which he criticised the focus on gadgets, declaring "the formula fails to work its magic.

"[45] Bosley Crowther, reviewing for The New York Times, felt "there's enough of the bright and bland bravado of the popular British super-sleuth mixed into this melee of rocket-launching to make it a bag of good Bond fun.

And there's so much of that scientific clatter – so much warring of super-capsules out in space and fussing with electronic gadgets in a great secret underground launching pad – that this way out adventure picture should be the joy and delight of the youngsters and give pleasure to the reasonable adults who can find release in the majestically absurd.

[48] Time magazine was sharply critical of the film, claiming the franchise had become "the victim of the same misfortune that once befell Frankenstein: there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy."

The outer-space sequences would be more appropriate in a grade school educational short entitled Our Amazing Universe, and the volcanic climax is a series of clumsy process shots that no one took the trouble to fix.

Even Connery seems uncomfortable and fatigued..."[49] Clifford Terry of the Chicago Tribune remarked that "a large percentage of You Only Live Twice is disappointing, lacking the wit and zip, the pacing and punch, of its predecessors, especially the first three.

Roald Dahl's script is larded with sex-slanted jokes that are either pathetically feeble or sophomorically coarse, Bond's patented puns are punier and even Connery's enthusiasm for his shrewd, suave, and sensual character seems to have waned.

The website's critical consensus reads, "With exotic locales, impressive special effects, and a worthy central villain, You Only Live Twice overcomes a messy and implausible story to deliver another memorable early Bond flick.

"[54] Danny Peary wrote that You Only Live Twice "should have been about twenty minutes shorter" and described it as "not a bad Bond film, but it doesn't compare to its predecessors – the formula had become a little stale.

"[55] Jim Smith and Stephen Lavington, in their 2002 retrospective, Bond Films, judged Ken Adams's production design “astonishing.”[56] They conclude: “You Only Live Twice is a loving tribute to the idea that nothing succeeds like excess.

[…] This is pop art, delivered with punch and panache.”[57] IGN ranked You Only Live Twice as the fourth-best Bond film,[58] and Entertainment Weekly as the second-best, considering that it "pushes the series to the outer edge of coolness".

[63] John Brosnan, in his book James Bond in the Cinema, compared the film to an episode of Thunderbirds due to its reliance on gadgetry, but he admitted it had pace and spectacle.