Summary
For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan’s security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however. Korea’s nuclear program, China’s rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan’s security policy? Will confluence with U.S. interests—and the alliance—survive intact? Will the policy be transformed? Or will Japan become more autonomous?
Richard J. Samuels demonstrates that over the last decade, a revisionist group of Japanese policymakers has consolidated power. The Koizumi government of the early 2000s took bold steps to position Japan’s military to play a global security role. It left its successor, the Abe government, to further define and legitimate Japan’s new grand strategy, a project well under way-and vigorously contested both at home and in the region. Securing Japan begins by tracing the history of Japan’s grand strategy—from the Meiji rulers, who recognized the intimate connection between economic success and military advance, to the Konoye consensus that led to Japan’s defeat in World War II and the postwar compact with the United States.
Samuels shows how the ideological connections across these wars and agreements help explain today’s debate. He then explores Japan’s recent strategic choices, arguing that Japan will ultimately strike a balance between national strength and national autonomy, a position that will allow it to exist securely without being either too dependent on the United States or too vulnerable to threats from China. Samuels’s insights into Japanese history, society, and politics have been honed over a distinguished career and enriched by interviews with policymakers and original archival research. Securing Japan is a definitive assessment of Japanese security policy and its implications for the future of East Asia.
Country or Region: Japan
Samuels, Richard. J
Abstract
Which Japanese leader will emerge to help build a consensus among the country’s strategic choices: constructing a national identity as a great or middle power, defining its role in regional or global terms, and maintaining relations neither too close to nor too far from both Beijing and Washington?
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Park, Jinsoo
Abstract
This article argues that the dual identities of political rivals and regional leaders have been of critical importance in determining China and Japan’s regional policies and their bilateral relations within East Asian cooperation. China and Japan, in identifying each other as political rivals rather than cooperative partners, have defined their interests in regional cooperative projects, particularly those led by the other party, in terms of power politics. At the same time, China and Japan’s efforts to gain followers’ acceptance of their aspired leadership identities have shaped their regional policy options and behaviours. The combination effects of these dual identities have produced variances in China and Japan’s regional policies and their bilateral relations within East Asian financial and institutional cooperation. Particularly with regards to regional projects led by the other party and supported by a majority of followers, China and Japan cooperated with the intention of neutralizing the other’s dominance in the region and to demonstrate the responsibilities one should assume as aspirant regional leader. China or Japan opposed, in terms of power politics, cooperative projects the other party initiated that did not secure majority support among followers, instead promoting their own initiatives to expand followers’ acceptance of their leadership.
Noble, Gregory W
Abstract
Regular convening of East Asian summits and rising concerns about the American dollar have heightened interest in Asian cooperation. Japan will necessarily play a central role in regional endeavors, and the United States must at least acquiesce if regional coordination is to progress. Among American accounts, the most theoretically elaborate and systematically comparative analysis is A World of Regions, while Remapping East Asia provides the most authoritative overview of recent developments. Japanese-language studies of East Asian regionalism agree that regional cooperation is far less institutionalized and rule-based in East Asia than in Europe, but they include a wider range of opinion about the desirability and feasibility of cooperation. Skeptics on the right warn that efforts to create a regional community would weaken the United States–Japan alliance, undermine universal values, and cede regional leadership to China. Optimists on the left counter that regional cooperation holds out the only hope for ameliorating nationalist conflicts. Most numerous are centrists arguing for active cooperation on economics and the environment, but only cautious moves on politics and security. Despite their caution, Japanese authors convey a sense that changes to the American-led global and regional order are occurring and likely will continue.
Mochizuki, Mike
Summary
While appearing to be more nationalistic and less reluctant to engage international security challenges, Japan continues to pursue a comprehensive strategy integrating its security and economic interests. It has recalibrated this strategy by expanding defense cooperation with the United States, becoming more assertive about defending its own territory, providing non-combat support in the war on terrorism, and promoting East Asian economic integration. Despite widespread public opposition to the U.S.-led war against Iraq, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has so far minimized the political backlash against his support for the Bush administration’s policies. By bolstering its alliance with the United States, Japan has also gained greater maneuverability to pursue a more autonomous foreign policy in Asia and beyond. Through a multifaceted approach, Japan seeks to cultivate an East Asian environment that is more hospitable to its long-term economic and security interests.
Mochizuki, Mike
Abstract
The current process of Japanese domestic change has the potential to produce a Japan that will be more supportive of U.S. interests. In Japan, political realignment has depolarized the ideological conflict about defense policy and Japan’s security relationship with the United States, and recent electoral reform could eventually cause elections to be contested more on the basis of policy than on client-centered politics. But in the near term, there is the danger of weak and unstable governments that will be unable to implement genuine reform in terms of both economic and foreign policy. Yen appreciation and structural recession are motivating Japan to reconsider developmental corporatism as the most effective way of promoting international economic competitiveness while minimizing the negative social effects of economic change at home. In East Asia, Japan is exporting the export-led model of development and thereby magnifying the trade pressures on the United States. If Japan were to fail, either by choice or indecision, to shift away from neomercantilist economic policies and business practices, there could be adverse political and economic consequences for the United States and, ultimately, damage to the U.S.-Japan security relationship.
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Katzenstein, P. J
Summary
Nonviolent state behavior in Japan, this book argues, results from the distinctive breadth with which the Japanese define security policy, making it inseparable from the quest for social stability through economic growth. While much of the literature on contemporary Japan has resisted emphasis on cultural uniqueness, Peter J. Katzenstein seeks to explain particular aspects of Japan’s security policy in terms of legal and social norms that are collective, institutionalized, and sometimes the source of intense political conflict and change. Culture, thus specified, is amenable to empirical analysis, suggesting comparisons across policy domains and with other countries. Katzenstein focuses on the traditional core agencies of law enforcement and national defense. The police and the military in postwar Japan are, he finds, reluctant to deploy physical violence to enforce state security. Police agents rarely use repression against domestic opponents of the state, and the Japanese public continues to support, by large majorities, constitutional limits on overseas deployment of the military. Katzenstein traces the relationship between the United States and Japan since 1945 and then compares Japan with postwar Germany. He concludes by suggesting that while we may think of Japan’s security policy as highly unusual, it is the definition of security used in the United States that is, in international terms, exceptional.
Hughes, Llewelyn
Abstract
Japan’s status as a nonnuclear weapons state remains of ongoing interest to policy analysts and scholars of international relations. For some, Japanese nuclearization is a question not of whether but of when. This article reassesses the state of the evidence on the nuclearization of Japan. It finds that support in Japan for the development of an independent nuclear deterrent remains negligible. Evidence demonstrates that ministries and agencies with responsibility for foreign and security policy have sought to consolidate Japan’s existing insurance policies against nuclear threats—multilateral regimes and the extension of the U.S. nuclear deterrent to Japan—rather than seeking an indigenous nuclear deterrent. The article also finds, however, that the door to independent nuclearization remains ajar. Policymakers have ensured that constitutional and other domestic legal hurdles do not significantly constrain Japan from developing an independent nuclear deterrent. Further, recent centralization of authority in the prime minister and Cabinet Office has increased the freedom of action of leaders, enabling them to overcome political opposition to changes in security policy to a degree not possible in the past. This suggests that Japan’s future position toward nuclear weapons could be more easily altered than before, should leader preferences change.
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Heginbotham, Eric, Ratner, Ely. and Samuels, Richard J
Abstract
Japan is undergoing profound changes that are empowering its political leadership at the expense of its bureaucracy. But rather than bringing about a clean transfer of institutional authority, the reforms have created gridlock. The U.S.-Japanese alliance isn’t dead, but it is getting more complicated.
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Berger, T. U., M. Mochizuki, J. Tsuchiyama, and N. K. Fōramu
Summary
How have shifts in both the international environment and domestic politics affected the trajectory of Japanese foreign policy? Does it still make sense to depict Japan as passive and reactive, or have the country’s leaders become strategic and proactive? Japan in International Politics presents a nuanced picture of Japanese foreign policy, emphasizing the ways in which slow, adaptive changes, informed by pragmatic liberalism, have served the national interest.
The authors analyze core issues in the arenas of security policy, economic relations, and regional diplomacy. The concluding chapter of the book considers the significance of Japan’s current foreign policy posture for its future role in international politics.
Acharya, Amitav, and Buzan, Barry
Summary
Given that the world has moved well beyond the period of Western colonialism, and clearly into a durable period in which non-Western cultures have gained their political autonomy, it is long past time that non-Western voices had a higher profile in debates about international relations, not just as disciples of Western schools of thought, but as inventors of their own approaches. Western IR theory has had the advantage of being the first in the field, and has developed many valuable insights, but few would defend the position that it captures everything we need to know about world politics.
In this book, Acharya and Buzan introduce non-Western IR traditions to a Western IR audience, and challenge the dominance of Western theory. An international team of experts reinforce existing criticisms that IR theory is Western-focused and therefore misrepresents and misunderstands much of world history by introducing the reader to non-Western traditions, literature and histories relevant to how IR is conceptualised.
Including case studies on Chinese, Japanese, South Korean, Southeast Asian, Indian and Islamic IR this book redresses the imbalance and opens up a cross-cultural comparative perspective on how and why thinking about IR has developed in the way it has. As such, it will be invaluable reading for both Western and Asian audiences interested in international relations theory.
Suzuki, Shogo
Abstract
Recent studies have increasingly argued that the Chinese leadership uses Japan’s imperialistic past as a tool for domestic and political bargaining. However, this argument fails to appreciate the embedded nature of negative memories within China. This article forwards an alternative argument by situating Japanese militaristic history within Chinese national identity. By examining a wide range of Chinese primary sources often underutilized by International Relations (IR) analysts, it moves beyond narrow, elite-centred explanations. The article argues that modern China’s national identity has been characterized by an acute sense of ‘victimhood’ arising from its turbulent interactions with International Society, and that Japan plays an important role as an ‘Other’ which enhances China’s self-image as a ‘victim’. Furthermore, it claims that Japan’s emergence as an ‘Other’ in China’s national identity is a by-product of China’s attempts to regain its social and moral legitimacy within a post-Cold War International Society increasingly dominated by the Western powers. By highlighting the deeply entrenched nature of Japanese imperialist history in China’s national identity, the article also shows that history is more than just part of a ‘toolkit’ that can be rationally utilized by the political elite, and that states are moral agents that are deeply affected by history.
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Nau, Henry R., and Deepa M. Ollapally
Summary
Worldviews of Aspiring Powers provides a serious study of the domestic foreign policy debates in five world powers who have gained more influence as the US’s has waned: China, Japan, India, Russia and Iran. Featuring a leading regional scholar for each essay, each essay identifies the most important domestic schools of thought–nationalists, realists, globalists, idealists/exceptionalists–and connects them to the historical and institutional sources that fuel each nation’s foreign policy experience. While scholars have applied this approach to US foreign policy, this book is the first to track the competing schools of foreign policy thought within five of the world’s most important rising powers. Concise and systematic, Worldviews of Aspiring Powers will serve as both an essential resource for foreign policy scholars trying to understand international power transitions and as a text for courses that focus on the same.
Furukawa, Katsuhisa, Michael J. Green, James J. Wirtz, Yuri Fedorov, Avner Cohen, Peter R. Lavoy, Kang Choi, Tan See Seng, and Rod Lyon
Summary
The Long Shadow is the first comprehensive, systematic examination of the roles and implications of nuclear weapons in the dramatically different post–Cold War security environment. Leading experts investigate the roles and salience of nuclear weapons in the national security strategies of twelve countries and the ASEAN states, and their implications for security and stability in a broadly defined Asian security region that includes the Middle East. The study also investigates the prospects for nuclear terrorism in Asia.
A chief conclusion of the study is that nuclear weapons influence national security strategies in fundamental ways and that deterrence continues to be the dominant role and strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons. Offensive and defensive strategies may increase in salience but will not surpass the deterrence function. Another major conclusion is that although there could be destabilizing situations, on balance, nuclear weapons have reinforced security and stability in the Asian security region by assuaging national security concerns, strengthening deterrence and the status quo, and preventing the outbreak and escalation of major hostilities.
As nuclear weapons will persist and cast a long shadow on security in Asia and the world, it is important to reexamine and redefine “old” ideas, concepts, and strategies as well as develop “new” ones relevant to the contemporary era. In line with this, the global nuclear order should be constructed anew based on present realities.
Yoshihara, Toshi, and James R. Holmes, eds
Summary
A “second nuclear age” has begun in the post-Cold War world. Created by the expansion of nuclear arsenals and new proliferation in Asia, it has changed the familiar nuclear geometry of the Cold War. Increasing potency of nuclear arsenals in China, India, and Pakistan, the nuclear breakout in North Korea, and the potential for more states to cross the nuclear-weapons threshold from Iran to Japan suggest that the second nuclear age of many competing nuclear powers has the potential to be even less stable than the first.
Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age assembles a group of distinguished scholars to grapple with the matter of how the United States, its allies, and its friends must size up the strategies, doctrines, and force structures currently taking shape if they are to design responses that reinforce deterrence amid vastly more complex strategic circumstances. By focusing sharply on strategy — that is, on how states use doomsday weaponry for political gain — the book distinguishes itself from familiar net assessments emphasizing quantifiable factors like hardware, technical characteristics, and manpower. While the emphasis varies from chapter to chapter, contributors pay special heed to the logistical, technological, and social dimensions of strategy alongside the specifics of force structure and operations. They never lose sight of the human factor — the pivotal factor in diplomacy, strategy, and war.
