Summary
In Japan Rising, Kenneth B. Pyle explores the remarkable history of Japan’s shifting foreign policy over the last 150 years. He identifies the common threads that bind the divergent strategies of modern Japan, arguing that few countries in recent history have been as responsive to the forces of the international environment. As we enter the new century and Japan once again changes course, the implications for our alliance and the balance of power in Asia are huge. Japan Rising is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how Japan arrived at this moment – and what to expect in the future.
Country or Region: Japan
Ozawa, Ichirō, Louisa Rubinfien, and Eric Gower
Summary
Providing a new perspective on post-Cold War Japan, the author argues that Japan must become a “normal” nation–taking responsibility for its freedoms, international status, and citizens–evaluates modern Japanese politics, and offers solutions to problems he perceives.
From 1999 Kirkus Reviews: A master plan for an institutional makeover of Japan from a political insider whose revisionist agenda remains firmly rooted in the ruling class’s long-standing preoccupation with national security. A former Liberal Democratic Party shogun, Ozawa became an influential member of the upstart coalition that wrested power from the LDP last year. Aware that his economically formidable country faces a host of new challenges in the postCold War era, he offers a series of proposals at once parochial and visionary for making parliamentary government more accountable, responsive, and responsible on the home front, less hesitant in the wider world. To facilitate effective government action, for example, he would give local authorities greater autonomy, nurture a genuinely competitive two-party system, reform campaign finance, and redraw the electoral map. Noting that the industrious populace has derived precious little improvement in its standard of living from Dai Nihon’s prosperity, Ozawa goes FDR one better in stumping for five freedoms (from teeming urban centers, corporate tyranny, overwork, ageism/sexism, and petty regulation). He advocates a shakeup in the nation’s rigid educational methods to encourage students to think for themselves in order to help Japanese companies remain innovative players in the global marketplace. Ozawa also calls on Tokyo to become a high-profile source of foreign aid that sets the pace in environmental matters–a worthy ambition for a resource- poor nation that leads the league in slaughtering dolphins and whales. Senator Jay Rockefeller’s pious introduction takes no note of such contradictions. Whether Ozawa’s deadly earnest call for his fellow Japanese to create a more open society can gain a broad-based readership in the West is an open question. For certain, however, his grand design is in the self-interested tradition of an insular nation-state whose capacity to adapt has not been in serious doubt since the Meiji Restoration.
Oros, Andrew
Summary
Normalizing Japan seeks to answer the question of what future direction Japan’s military policies are likely to take, by considering how policy has evolved since World War II, and what factors shaped this evolution. It argues that Japanese security policy has not changed as much in recent years as many believe, and that future change also will be highly constrained by Japan’s long-standing “security identity,” the central principle guiding Japanese policy over the past half-century. Oros’ analysis is based on detailed exploration of three cases of policy evolution—restrictions on arms exports, the military use of outer space, and cooperation with the United States on missile defense—which shed light on other cases of policy change, such as Japan’s deployment of its military to Iraq and elsewhere and its recent creation of a Ministry of Defense. More broadly, the book refines how “ideational” factors interact with domestic politics and international changes to create policy change.
Miyaoka, Isao
Abstract
Since the end of the Cold War, Japan’s acceptance and institutionalization of a non-combat military role to aid the US has led to its new identity as a US ally and has transformed the content of its ‘peace state’ identity. It is this role that has made these two identities more compatible. This article first attempts to measure the long-term shift in Japan’s two identities by conducting a content analysis of Japan’s Defence White Papers and then seeks to trace the formation process of Japan’s dual security identity through which it accepted and institutionalized a non-combat military role. For this analysis, the process is divided into three stages: the Cold War period when its two identities as a ‘peace state’ and a US ally were considered incompatible, the period of the 1990s when Japan started to accept and institutionalized a non-combat military role, and the period after 11 September 2001 when Japan’s dual security identity gradually got established. In the final section, the article discusses the source of a security identity shift in Japan and draws some implications for the future of its security policy.
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Midford, Paul
Summary
In this book, Paul Midford engages claims that since 9/11 Japanese public opinion has turned sharply away from pacifism and toward supporting normalization of Japan’s military power, in which Japanese troops would fight alongside their American counterparts in various conflicts worldwide.
Midford argues that Japanese public opinion has never embraced pacifism. It has, instead, contained significant elements of realism, in that it has acknowledged the utility of military power for defending national territory and independence, but has seen offensive military power as ineffective for promoting other goals—such as suppressing terrorist networks and WMD proliferation, or promoting democracy overseas.
Over several decades, these realist attitudes have become more evident as the Japanese state has gradually convinced its public that Tokyo and its military can be trusted with territorial defense, and even with noncombat humanitarian and reconstruction missions overseas. On this basis, says Midford, we should re-conceptualize Japanese public opinion as attitudinal defensive realism.
Lind, Jennifer M
Abstract
Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College examines the conventional wisdom that domestic factors and strong antimilitarist norms have constrained Japan’s security policy since the country’s bitter defeat in World War II. She argues that despite such restraints, Japan “has transformed itself from a burned-out ruin to one of the world’s foremost military powers.” She considers the implications of this finding for realist and contructivist theories of state behavior in the international system.
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Kawasaki, Tsuyoshi
Abstract
The recent domestic constructivist studies characterize Japanese security policy as a serious anomaly to realism and a crucial case vindicating their approach to the larger study of world politics. The present paper challenges this view. It advances a postclassical realist interpretation of Japan’s core security policy in the past quarter century. Japan’s military doctrine expressed in the 1976 National Defense Program Outline (NDPO) is consistent with postclassical realism’s predictions, as opposed to neorealism’s predictions, which focus on the dynamics of the regional security dilemma and the question of financial burden resulting from military build-up. In addition, postclassical realism offers a more compelling theoretical guide for understanding Japan’s core security policy than defensive realism or mercantile realism. This paper backs up its argument with the empirical evidence that Takuya Kubo, the author of the NDPO, himself intentionally based the NDPO on a postclassical realist line of thinking.
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Katzenstein, Peter J
Summary
Since the unexpected end of the Cold War, standard arguments about power politics can no longer be adopted uncritically. This has led to a renewed interest in Japan’s unusually peaceful security policy.
Japan’s championing of “comprehensive security” is central to this collection. Peter J. Katzenstein’s essays explore this concept which not only encompasses traditional military concerns but also domestic aspects of security. The book’s focus on counter-terrorism and national security highlights a policy approach which, over decades, Japan has developed with political patience and diplomatic finesse. These essays advocate an eclectic approach that helps in recognizing new questions and that seek to combine elements from different analytical perspectives in the exploration of novel lines of argument.
Additionally, the book features an entirely new, substantial introduction that explores and elaborates the themes of the collection while bringing it up to date. This collection will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Japanese politics, security studies and international relations.
Hughes, Christopher W
Abstract
This essay challenges the dominant negative critiques of the foreign policy of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ possesses a coherent grand strategy vision, capable of securing Japan’s national interests in an age of multipolarity and centered on a less dependent and more proactive role in the U.S.-Japan alliance, strengthened Sino-Japanese ties, and enhanced East Asian regionalism. However, the DPJ has failed to implement its policy due to domestic and international structural pressures. Consequently, the DPJ is defaulting back into a strategy in the style of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Japanese and U.S. policymakers should recognize the risks of a strategy characterized not by “reluctant realism” but by more destabilizing “resentful realism.”
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Funabashi, Yoichi
Abstract
“A crisis almost always reveals the reality, and the Persian Gulf crisis revealed the real Japan. In the moment of truth, an economic superpower found itself merely an automatic teller machine-one that needed a kick before dispensing the cash. The notion that economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence turned out to be a materialist illusion. At least many Japanese now seem to subscribe to that view.” In light of this crisis, Yoichi Funabashi, one of the most influential commentators in Japan, proposes a new vision for Japan: “global civilian power”—a nation that makes active contribution to the international community through an economic, diplomatic, civilian approach rather than a military one.
Bukh, Alexander
Summary
This book is the first attempt to examine Japan’s relations with Russia from the perspective of national identity; providing a new interpretation of Japan’s perceptions of Russia and foreign policy.
Alexander Bukh focuses on the construction of the Japanese self using Russia as the other, examining the history of bilateral relations and comparisons between the Russian and Japanese national character. The first part of the book examines the formation of modern Japan’s perceptions of Russia, focusing mainly on the Cold War years. The second part of the book examines how this identity construction has been reflected in Japan’s economic, security and territorial dispute related policy towards post-Soviet Russia.
Providing not only a case study of the Japan-Russia relationship, but also engaging in a critical examination of existing International Relations frameworks for conceptualizing the relationship between national identity and foreign policy, the appeal of the book will not be limited to those interested in Japanese/Russian politics but will also be of interest to the broader body of students of International Relations.
Berger, Thomas U
Summary
After suffering crushing military defeats in 1945, both Japan and Germany have again achieved positions of economic dominance and political influence. Yet neither seeks to regain its former military power; on the contrary, antimilitarism has become so deeply rooted in the Japanese and German national psyches that even such questions as participation in international peacekeeping forces are met with widespread domestic opposition. In Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan Thomas Berger analyzes the complex domestic and international political forces that brought about this unforeseen transformation.
Katzenstein, P. J.
Summary
Chapters on China, Japan, Russia. Contributors ask whether it is more useful to conceive of the world as arrayed in regional, cultural, institutional complexes or organized along the conventional dimensions of power, alliance, and geography. They argue that perspectives that neglect the roles of culture and identity are no longer adequate to explain the complexities of a world undergoing rapid change.
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Berger, Thomas
Abstract
The Asian Pacific region is highly unstable, but not for the reasons usually assumed. Contrary to the assertions of Realists, who argue multipolarity makes Asia ‘ripe for rivalry’, overwhelming US strategic preponderance should make the balance of power quite stable. Likewise, while much is made by more liberal International Relations theorists of the relative absence of strong international institutions and democracy in Asia, recent trends seem to point in a more positive direction. The real source of instability lies in the beliefs and values held by regional actors. Contested sovereignty on the Korean peninsula and in the Taiwan straits makes military conflict seem a real possibility. Latent isolationism in the US and Japan may lead to a mishandling of a crisis were one to emerge. This Constructivist line of analysis suggests that more attention should be paid to these intangible potential sources of conflict and miscalculation.
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Alagappa, Muthiah
Summary
More than a decade has passed since the end of the Cold War, but Asia still faces serious security challenges. These include the current security environment in the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and over Kashmir, the danger of nuclear and missile proliferation, and the concern with the rising power of China and with American dominance. Indeed, some experts see Asia as a dangerous and unstable place. Alagappa disagrees, maintaining that Asia is a far more stable, predictable, and prosperous region than it was in the postindependence period. This volume also takes account of the changed security environment in Asia since September 11, 2001.
Unlike many areas-studies approaches, Alagappa’s work makes a strong case for taking regional politics and security dynamics seriously from both theoretical and empirical approaches. The first part of this volume develops an analytical framework for the study of order; the salience of the different pathways to order is examined in the second part; the third investigates the management of specific security issues; and the final part discusses the nature of security order in Asia.
