Identity, Culture and Memory in Japanese Foreign Policy

Preface

Yoichiro Sato

Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

The return of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to power in late 2012 under the leadership of Abe Shinzo left an important mark in Japanese politics. Who would have expected Abe would renew the Japanese record of the longest serving prime minister, previously held by Katsura Taro who led the nation through the challenging war against Russia and for two more terms afterward? Abe’s resignation in September 2007 at less than a year of serving as a prime minister in his first term cited a health issue. The LDP lost power in September 2009 as its two prime ministers after the first Abe Cabinet failed to recapture popular support for the scandal-tainted ruling party amid the stubborn economic deflation and the deteriorating regional security environment.

The typical characteristics of prolonged leaderships in Japan—do nothing controversial to avoid making enemies—is probably not the way most observers would describe Abe. While making compromises is required of him just as his predecessors have gone through, Abe has from time to time pushed through considerable policy changes, such as endorsing the country’s participation in collective defense (Sato 2017b). The conservative vision he presented has guided the policy recourse during the past seven and a half years.

When we held our workshop to critique the initial chapter drafts of this book in November 2018, Japan was booming with international visitors under the government’s drive to promote inbound tourism as a new source of economic revenue. With the upcoming Tokyo Olympic then scheduled in summer 2020, both “whole-of-government” and “public-private” cooperation was at work under the central government’s slogan, “Yokoso [welcome to] Japan.” The reflationist economic policy Abe promoted by placing like-minded Kuroda Haruhiko in the governorship of the Central Bank of Japan brought back a period of economic growth, which albeit limitedly resembled ←vii | viii→the bubble economy boom era from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. All came to a sudden halt in the spring of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic reached the country.

Japan’s soft approach was not only inevitable because of the lack of a powerful constitutional authority of the executive, but also was realistic given the strong public reservation against giving the executive such power even during a crisis. It is not too difficult to imagine a root of such attitude is found in the country’s painful total defeat in World War II. Abe’s Finance Minister Aso Taro, whose outspokenness earned him a pro-Nazi labeling by some liberal Western journalists, caused yet another controversy when he cynically bragged Japan’s success owed to its “[higher] level of civility” [mindo ga chigau].1 Liberal Japanese media and leftist opposition parties were quick to question Aso’s remark, but the silence of the large segment of the public indicated that the pride is a shared feeling. The Japanese displayed the same sense of pride in their own self-discipline and public mindedness during the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake of March 2011.

Outside Japan, the pandemic has sharpened the ideological conflict between the United States and China. The propaganda war over the origin of and responsibility over the pandemic added fuel to the trade war. United States President Donald Trump’s cease-fire after the first stage agreement ←viii | ix→with China to improve the US trade balance is now at the risk of being abandoned. China continues to build up military infrastructure and presence throughout the South China Sea region, and the United States counters the Chinese move by increasing the frequency of its naval transit operations to challenge China’s claims. But, Japan’s previously growing activism in the South China Sea (Sato 2017a) appears to have peaked in the 2017–2018 period. The upgraded bilateral alliance between the United States and Japan as a result of the latter’s reinterpretation of the constitution and the national security legislation in 2015 (Sato 2017b) brings Japan closer to a hypothetical conflict, but a simple neorealist bandwagoning logic does not seem to explain the ways Japan is coping with divergence from its prime ally. Alliance dilemma is present and has grown (Atanassova-Cornelis and Sato 2019), and its material manifestations are inseparable from less tangible ideas, values, beliefs, and cultures. In the ongoing competition for a new order, Japan too utilizes old and new ideas which are consistent with its material interests (Rothman, Vyas, and Sato 2017).

1Asahi Shimbun Digital, June 4, 2020. https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASN6455 CGN64UTFK008.html.

References

Atanassova-Cornelis, E., & Sato, Y. (2019). The US-Japan alliance dilemma in the Asia-Pacific: Changing rationales and scope. The International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs, 54(4), 78–93.

Rothman, S., Vyas, U., & Sato, Y. (2017). Introduction. In Regional institutions, geopolitics and economics in the Asia-Pacific (pp. 1–10). London: Routledge.

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our thanks to the Czech Science Foundation for its financial support under standard research grant no. 18-05339S. We would also like to thank the Ritsumeikan Center for Asia Pacific Studies (RCAPS) at Ritsumeikan Asia-Pacific University for organizing a workshop in 2018, which helped us to meet and discuss the initial drafts of the chapters. And our thanks also go to our family members and friends for support and advice.

Introduction: National Identity and the Study of Japan

Michal Kolmaš

Metropolitan University Prague

Introduction

Has pacifism retreated from Japan? Is the country returning to its prewar militarist identity, or is it just reacting to the security developments in Asia and in the world? Or are ongoing political changes in Japan merely small steps on a long trajectory of incremental “normalization”? These questions have been in the forefront of Japan research for at least three decades now. The reasons are perhaps straightforward: There is indeed something happening with Japan. Japanese politicians have become less concerned with the promotion of pacifism into the world. They have visited the Yasukuni shrine, where souls of dead soldiers are enshrined, and called for the rejuvenation of Japanese role in the world. They have become critical of the postwar Constitution and its war-renouncing Article 9, which they no longer consider as an asset to Japan’s foreign policy, but rather a hindrance to it. They have changed security legislature in order to allow the Japanese military more freedom in participating in foreign missions.

Indeed, the extent and scope of changes is breathtaking. Japan has become much more active in the world. It has created a first overseas military base in Djibouti and has sent troops in a variety of peacekeeping missions around the world. It has transformed its institutional structure to allow for a better cooperation among ministries of defense and foreign affairs. Under the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, it has enacted a series of laws that allow for easier intelligence coordination with its allies, predominantly the United States. But what does that tell us about Japan? Do all these developments signal that the revisionist political leadership has succeeded in transforming Japanese pacifist ←1 | 2→identity? Or is it too soon or even wrong to suggest such a thing? And what would that mean for Japan, Asia, and the world?

We intend to do it by eclectically building on the prevailing scholarship on the role of ideas, identity, and culture in Japanese political change. Our main interest will be in the ideational background of Japanese policy making, but—differently to the abovementioned studies—we aim to broadly analyze these ideas within not merely Japanese postwar pacifism, but also education, ←2 | 3→popular culture, and economic model. We present a collection of chapters connected by the belief that rationality and calculated interests cannot simply explain changing Japanese trajectory. The chapters in our book show that identities and ideas matter, and that they constitute basis from which Japanese state operates. Instead of other identity-based studies, we do not merely focus on the state level of identity, but we illustrate the role of ideas on all levels of Japanese society.

Identity, Culture, and the Study of Japan1

Identity will serve as the main conceptual tool for our understanding of contemporary Japan. For most parts of the twentieth century, however, identity has been overlooked as a concept of interest for international relations scholars. Dominated by rationalist theories, International Relations (IR) scholars were interested in power, cooperation, institutions, and anarchy, rather than identity. If studied at all, state identity was understood in terms of power (superpowers, middle powers, small states, etc.). The surge of interest in identity and its relationship to foreign policy has resulted from the fourth great debate in IR theory during the 1980s and 1990s. The debate emancipated rationalists’ post-positivist enemies; and theories such as social constructivism, post-structuralism, environmentalism, and gender theory became more-or-less widely applied in international relations. Identity has been one of the key concepts these “new” theories worked with. Social constructivists, in particular, have been widely interested in the way how identity works and how it influences individual and state behavior. Building on sociology and psychology, constructivists focused on the context in which meanings are created and believed that this context (cultural, historical, and discursive) is essential for our understanding of the world—and IR.