Rethinking Japan's Identity and International Role

Tradition and Change in Japan's Foreign Policy

Susanne Klien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780415934381
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317794387
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This paper presents a study of Japan's international role with a special focus on its historical evolution. To that end, the following three pillars lay the necessary theoretical foundations: one, the notions of historical and political identity and a discussion of the ambivalent shapes they have taken in Japan; two, the regional context, an examination of Japan's situation with respect to Asian history as a whole, and finally, the "civilian power" concept as defined by Hanns W. Maull.

CHAPTER ONE
THEORETICAL INTRODUCTION

THIS THESIS PRESENTS A STUDY OF JAPAN’S INTERNATIONAL ROLE WITH A SPECIAL focus on its historical evolution. To that end the following three pillars will lay the necessary theoretical foundations: One, the notions of historical and political identity and a discussion of the ambivalent shapes they have taken in Japan; two, the regional context, an examination of Japan’s situation with respect to Asian history as a whole, and finally the third pillar, the “civilian power” concept, as described by Hanns W. Maull. Each of the three pillars will be explained in further detail below. While each of these three aspects will be discussed separately, one has to keep in mind that they are all mutually related.

1.1. Identity Debate

Japan’s position as an Asian country that joined the ranks of the industrialized Western world at a relatively early stage preconditioned it for being faced with the very fundamental question to which continent it truly belonged. Having a clearly Confucian cultural heritage from China, maintaining its Shintoist traditions and having been influenced more or less strongly at times by the West in various fields, Japan could be seen as the epitome of the country that is being torn between its various sources of origin and root. This basic ambiguity that has never been clarified completely has most probably given rise to the popular “nihonjin” discourse, a discourse about the essence of the Japanese as a people and nation. It has been pointed out many times by foreign observers, journalists and researchers that no other country indulges in this practice of self-observation and self-analysis with as much enthusiasm and insistency as Japan. One could describe this discourse as a public self-dissection at various levels, be it through articles published in newspapers targeted at the man in the street, books written for people with higher education or academic papers. This discourse which has been going on for many decades now can only be interpreted as a sign of Japan’s patent frustration with the difficulty of coming to terms with its identity problem. An interesting point is that this discourse has commonly been directed at and therefore in a way determined by the foreign culture considered to be the most important for Japan at the time¹; the “nihonjin” discourse can thus be taken as a reflection of Japan’s negative “other”, i.e. an examination of self modelled on supposedly entirely different others.

Apart from the purely emotional implication, however, there is the aspect of identity as a precondition for diplomacy; in other words, it is no exaggeration to say that a country needs to construct a fairly clear picture of its identity and values in order to be able to play a role at the international level—and to be taken seriously in exercising this role.² While Japan was putting all its efforts into reconstructing its post-war economy and enjoying the benefits of its security arrangements with the United States, deliberations about national identity were clearly in retreat. As soon as the Cold War era ended, however, and Japan had reached a certain level of saturation in its economic development, the well-known problématique was back on people’s minds again. The familiar debate about the nation’s characteristics, unique points, and last but not least, international role and tasks was taken up again.

After having argued that clarifying one’s identity is essential for practising an international role, I will change directions to make a contention which may appear to contradict what I have said before, but which in fact is just a point on the opposite end of the scale: the wilful determination of a nation’s identity may in some cases be misused for distinguishing one’s country from an external threat, whatever its form. This threat, in philosophical terms, has been referred to as the “other” as opposed to the “self”. This abuse of the national identity concept for the national interest in the Realist sense is exactly what happened in the Japan of the 1930s, to give one example, when the “kokutai” concept was mentioned with ever increasing frequency to suggest that the Japanese people, sharing a divine origin of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, were united in the framework of the “kokutai” which could be described as a sort of family state with the emperor as the father of the Japanese nation.

When referring to the clarification of national identity, I certainly do not have this kind of wilful distinction of a nation in mind that is carried out primarily for setting some border with the “other”. But still, the phenomenon of laying down one’s (imaginary) self for the sake of saving one’s skin from outer threat can be detected in Japanese history again and again, with the “other” varying depending on the particular time period. Concrete cases of this phenomenon will be dealt with in more detail in Chapter 2. It goes without saying that otherness as the essential criterium for the definition of “self” is not unique to Japanese history; it is a phenomenon that can be found even in countries and—at a smaller level—in individuals with the most varied cultural backgrounds and at all times. For example, Augustine seemed to have experienced the phenomenon of “otherness” when he found it necessary to propagate the negative “other” of paganism in order to consolidate the “self’ of Christianity. The idealized (in the sense that the negative aspects were emphasized to let the self appear in a more advantageous way) “other” was thus evidently essential for the creation of the Christian “self”.³ It seems to be a basic need of human existence to delineate one’s own territory or “self” against that of fellow human beings or “others”. It is for this reason that Connolly’s definition of the concept of “identity” seems plausible enough:

An identity is established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not exist in its distinctness and solidity.⁴

To put it more drastically, “self” cannot exist without “other”. Even if concrete information about that “other” is not available or available only in a very limited way, myths and images about it tend to be created sooner or later. Dale argues as follows:

The more distant the country, the greater is the temptation to extend the submerged landscape of private fantasy into the hearsay reaches of an exotic geography, to populate it with creatures of the imagination whose existence is otherwise rendered improbable by the dulling pressures of a known and banal reality. The mind abhors the vacuum, and where facts are in short supply, myth stands ever ready to cast its narrative nets over the yawning gaps.⁵

Apart from this general human phenomenon of setting some kind of border to delineate the territory of one’s personality, the “self-other” problématique is of particular importance in Japanese society in light of the existence of the concept of “soto” (outside) and “uchi” (inside). The distinction between one’s domain and what does not belong to that domain has been a well-established one in Japanese society.⁶

Seen against this background, it hardly comes as a surprise that the main aim of the aforementioned nihoniinron is to define Japanese identity in terms of difference or autonomy from the West or China, depending on which of them represented the relevant “other” at the time. One could also see Japan’s identity dilemma as a struggle between the forces of particularism (emphasis on Japan’s uniqueness) or relativism and universalism:

“China and the West have constituted the two ‘significant others’ from which the Japanese have borrowed models and against which they have affirmed and reaffirmed their identity. For the Japanese, learning from China and the West has been experienced as acquiring ‘universal’ civilization. The Japanese have thus had to stress their particularistic difference in order to differentiate themselves from the universal Chinese and Westerners. The nihonjinron or discussions of Japanese uniqueness are, therefore, discussions of ‘particularistic’ cultural differences of Japan from the ‘universal’ civilization.”⁷

Depending on which time period one looks at, either of these two forces was dominant: particularism could be equalled with isolationist, nationalist tendencies while universalism seems to correspond to a cooperative stance at the international level. Katô Akira categorizes Japan’s foreign policy into four phases according to the East-West and the expansionism-introvertedness axes⁸: while the first period between the Meiji Restoration and the outbreak of the First World War in 1918 could be resumed as “nishi”(West, shorthand for support for the West) and “dai” (big, shorthand for “expansionism”), the second phase from 1918 to 1945 is characterized by “higashi” (East) and “dai”, the third phase from 1945 to 1989 is described as “nishi” and “shô” (small, or introvertedness). The last phase from 1989 onwards until now is presented as a mixture of “nishi/higashi” and “dai/shô”. This evolution of Japan’s foreign policy line in phases will be presented in further detail in Chapter 3.

Although it goes without saying that for Japan, China and the West have represented the two major models, it should also be stressed that at the same time, Japan has never felt completely at ease with either of them. This feeling of unease has probably been expressed most clearly by the Japanese scholar Kôsaka Masataka who proposed the view that Japan has historically shifted between being an annex of the East and of the West, where it stands today. Japan’s position is described as a “hanarezashiki”, literally a detached room, implying that Japan has always kept its distance from China and later the West when taking over elements from their cultures.⁹ The “hanarezashiki” comparison makes clear that latent ambiguity in Japan’s position, namely that while on the surface the Japanese mode of life seems more Western than Eastern, Japan is still not an integral part of the West. Proposals for Japan to take on a role uniting both East and West indicate that lack of identification with both. The country’s peculiar position may have been compounded by its ready acceptance of Western judgement and evaluation of Japan; Befu suggests to refer to this process as “auto-Orientalism” or “do-it-yourself Orientalism” and elaborates as follows,

It is a process of accepting the “Orientalism” of the West (Said 1978) by the very people who are being Orientalized. Psychologically a masochistic process, it signifies internalization by the Orientalized people of the observation and judgment by the West toward them. Said, of course, focused on the Middle East for the Orientalized people, but a similar Orientalizing process took place in other parts of the world, including Japan (Kang 1988, Minear 1980, Mouer 1983), where the Japanese accepted the Western-centric scheme of the universe and believed in Westerners’ value judgments about Japan’s backwardness.¹⁰

It seems ironic that in the case of Japan, the cultural stereotyping and standardization Said refers to, has been practiced by the Japanese themselves with gusto and has given rise to the myth of inscrutability and uniqueness. This process has also been described as “reverse Orientalism”.¹¹

1.2. Civilian Power Concept

The second concept I will use in my study is the “civilian-power-approach” developped by Hanns W. Maull. Being constructivist in its basic outlook, this approach introduces a new type of international power, of which Germany and Japan are representative examples, namely civilian power. Debates about power in general, and specifically, the nature of Japan’s power, have been going on for quite a while. Traditionally, power has been widely associated with the notion of military power or force, no matter whether one is dealing with the Japanese case or not. With scepticism on the rise against the traditional Realist approach, however, it has become a widespread view that force is only one means of power. One of the biggest fallacies of the Realist school in international relations has been said to be the problem of seeing Japan’s economic power automatically leading to military power.¹² The Realist conception of a gradual power scale with force constituting the top of that scale has also been criticized as follows,

Phrases describing force as the ‘ultimate’ form of power imply that all forms of power are arrayed on a single continuum of effectiveness or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One Theoretical Introduction
• Chapter Two Japan’s Identity Dilemma
• Chapter Three Historical Survey of the Evolution of Japan’s Role in the World
• Chapter Four The Contemporary Political Discourse in Japan on Japan’s Foreign Policy
• Chapter Five Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index