Japan's World Power

Assessment, Outlook and Vision

Guibourg Delamotte

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367260316
• eBook ISBN: 9781351866699
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the end of the 1960s, Japan's power in the world has largely been linked to its economic successes, while it has pursued a decidedly pacifist post-war foreign policy. Recently, however, there has been talk of Constitutional reform, especially since the new security legislation of 2016. Coupled with the conservative tilt of the two Houses, there is evidence to suggest that Japan's approach to exercising its power could be changing.

Japan's World Power therefore seeks to examine the nature of Japan's power today, showing how the country's influence on the global stage appears to be shifting from economic and financial, to more political and military. Featuring a team of Japanese international relations experts, each chapter analyses the different facets of Japanese power, evaluating both its current status and the challenges which lie ahead. Ultimately, however, this book demonstrates that despite recent developments and changes, the way in which Japan exercises its power remains decidedly different from other major powers as it continues to be guided by its pacifist identity.

Providing a multi-faceted assessment of Japan's power, as well as its weaknesses, this book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese Politics, Asian Foreign Policy and Asian Politics in general.

Part I

Japan’s power strategy on the international scene

1 The power of Japan and its ‘Grand Strategy’¹

Kanehara Nobukatsu

Power of a nation consists of military force, economic might and ideas to lead humans. A nation uses these elements of power to pursue its national interests. This small article tries to provide a theoretical framework to understand how Japan’s national interests are defined and how they are pursued. To understand it, a his torical perspective is necessary, because the national interests change through time.

In the late nineteenth century, Japan joined the international community forged and shaped by the Europeans and the Americans since the industrial revolution gave a huge technological edge and national power to them. The impact of the industrial revolution changed completely the international order forever. Under external pressure, Japan had to redefine its national interests and to reconsider the ways how to pursue them.

Japan developed at an exceptionally early time in Asia, and Japan had to go through a painful process of modernisation. Japan had to industrialise its economy to catch up with the European and the American precursors, to create a centralised government with Emperor Meiji who had been just restored to power after the end of the long reign of the samurais (warriors) of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867), and to create a Napoleonic-style national army who understood immediately after World War I that the age of a total war was on the doorstep of Japan.

From the nineteenth century, Japan saw many of the Asian countries become European and American colonies. The proud kingdoms and dynasties in China, Indochina, India, Persia and Turkey were decomposed, colonised or half-colonised. Survival and national defence became the most important national goals. Liberation of Asia was a popular slogan. But after World War I, Japan chose to prepare for the next total war and secure necessary natural resources through expansion in Asia.Inside Japan, the radical change of industrialisation awoke people politically. Freedom and equality became new Japanese values. The Imperial Parliament of Japan opened in 1890. Parliamentary democracy with plural political parties and universal suffrage became inevitable at the turn of the twentieth century. Japanese intellectuals read books by thinkers of the European Enlightenment, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, and dreamt of the French revolution or the American revolutionary war for independence. The modern Western political thought shook the souls of many young Japanese. Mutsu Munemitsu, who was the renown foreign minister of Japan at the time of Sino–Japanese War (1894–1895), wrote a poem entitled ‘Reading world History’ when he was in jail as a young revolutionary:

Peace and war in the world History of six continents, rise and fall of nations through three thousand years, there was no just war under the Heaven, the strong ate up the weak, no different from butcher’s place, but when I came to the chapter of the American Revolutionary War for Independence, my eyes were opened with joy.

(trans. by the author)

And in the first half of the twentieth century, the social gap of wealth created by industrialisation prompted socialist labour movement. Ideological impact of the Russian revolution was strongly felt.

These new values like democracy and people’s social welfare could not prevail and were suffocated after Japan started to be involved in a series of armed conflicts with foreign powers, starting from establishment the of Manchukuo in 1930s and on to the end of World War II in 1945.

During the course of the twentieth century, the world changed profoundly. The two World Wars were fought, many great european dynasties fell. Asians and Africans gained independence. Industrialisation spread globally, and the communist Eastern Bloc led by the Soviet Union collapsed. Towards the end of the last century, the liberal international order finally prevailed. This is an order that is based upon rules and consensus. The underlying principle is that every human is equal and has the same dignity. Nobody is ruled without their consent. Trade is free. The sea is open to anybody. Today, Japan’s foremost national interest is to sustain this liberal international order. In so doing, Japan can best pursue its national interests. This is the Grand Strategy of Japan for the twenty-first century, and the basis of power for Japan. Now let me explain how to frame the strategy in theory.

The state and the national interest

At present, the most powerful human group is the state. In modern international society, businesses and NGOs that operate on a global scale are said to have great power, but the sovereign state still plays the leading role. A super state that would encompass the whole globe still does not exist.

A state is the means to guarantee the survival of its members. To do so, a state tries to survive itself. What should the state and its authorities do to ensure the survival of its citizens and that of the nation they form collectively? To answer that question is to determine the national interest pursued by the state. The national interest in a democracy is what the elected members of the state determine them to be. What should guide them in determining national interest?

The national interest of a state is determined, first, by strategic thinking. Its leaders look objectively at the outside world and consider the means appropriate to avoid or overcome the threats to its survival while simultaneously considering the most appropriate means to improve the conditions of that survival. That is what is known as strategic thinking.

Strategic thinking is thinking about what means should be combined, in terms of both foreign policy and military affairs, in order to achieve the state’s highest objective – survival.

Second, the national interest of the state is defined and underpinned by universal moral feelings. In order to live as a group, human beings have been endowed with a faculty called conscience. Conscience gives rise to a deep inner sense of kind ness and compassion for others. Confucianism teaches love and compassion. Mencius also preaches compassion, giving the example of unconditionally rescuing and caring for others’ children who are in serious danger. Christianity preaches love; Buddhism, wisdom and compassion; Gandhi, love for humanity. All of them teach us to scoop-up conscience with our bare hands.

Through human activities to ensure survival and improve the conditions for it, a deep sense of love overflows from people’s hearts, as does a sense of happiness. Happiness is a feeling that validates the joy of living with loved ones. On this basis, people sometimes do not hesitate to sacrifice themselves for those whom they love. Conversely suffering flares up from human activities that hurt others and damage the group, thus reducing its chance of survival. From there, a sense of guilt and feelings of remorse well up. These are moral feelings. They are innately endowed. Ethics arises from them and so does the ability to discern right from wrong.

The faculty to discern right from wrong stems from our conscience. Conscience is an innate faculty endowed to humans for the survival of the group to which they belong. Conscience seeks deep inner happiness. Therefore, human beings are driven to seek happiness. And, as the result, human beings necessarily continue to seek ethical perfection. Meanwhile, conscience is constantly being cultivated. In that process, decisions and judgments to discern right from wrong that arise from conscience are transformed through numerous experiences into a set of beliefs. When these beliefs are systematised, a value system emerges. This value system is further developed with the consent of the majority into the ethics, morality, institutions and laws of the society as a whole.

The ethics, morality, institutions, and laws thus created differ from people to people and from state to state. They are unique. And yet the conscience that underlies them is a faculty that is universal in humankind. For that reason, human beings transcend the state; they transcend ethnicity; they are able to understand one another and live together. The core politico-ethical ideas that form the mainstream in international society today are basic human rights and democracy, which arose out of European Enlightenment thought.

Third, a state’s national interest is determined through discussion: free exchange of ideas, thoughts and speeches among the citizens of that state. Through open discussion, they come to share the strategic thinking and moral feelings referred to above and, as a result, ‘the general will of the people’ is formulated. The ‘will of Heaven’ manifests itself clearly as the voice of the people. Ordinarily, what confirms the general will of the people is the parliament and it is the administration that carries out its decisions. Thus, the parliament is said to be the highest organ of the state, and the administration is called the executive branch.

Freedom of thought and speech and open discussions are indispensable activities for people living in a group. Human intelligence is limited. Human society is not driven by human intelligence alone. The idea that all the activities of human society can be controlled and managed intellectually is an arrogance to which those in power all too easily succumb. The breadth of social changes easily breaches people’s intellectual horizons. In fact, social changes always continue to surprise people. People who are surprised are forced to activate their conscience and revitalise their strategic thinking. An even more primitive or animal instinct for survival commands them to do so. Words are born from this. Borrowed words come from outside, but real words always burst forth from conscience in the inner depths of the heart. These real words create a new society and change the old one.

In particular, there are times when the situation in the outside world undergoes dramatic changes and the survival of the group is threatened; old words can suddenly lose their meaning. Ethics, morality, laws and institutions quickly lose theirs as well. It is an ‘age of upheaval’. At this time, new words burst forth from the depths of many people’s hearts. From the instinctive urge for survival that drives the human intellect, words are born. Particularly important are the words that conscience formulates. When the new words that conscience formulates rise to the level of becoming the general will of the people, they give rise to new ethics, new laws. Thus, the violence that would sometimes accompany social changes could be avoided, and society would change gradually and peacefully in a moderate way, in accordance with newly acquired experiences. What is important for achieving this is freedom of thought and speech as well as open discussions.

In a democratic state, open discussions among free people determine the state’s national interest. This is called defining the national interest.

Defining the national interest

What are the contents of Japan’s most important interests, those that can be considered matters of survival? In defining national interest, two points should be kept in mind.

The first is that we as humans are normally driven to ensure the survival not only of the groups we belong to, including the nation, but also of humankind. Accordingly, humans defending narrowly their self-interest alone will bypass their best interest; likewise national interest construed too narrowly will not help in pursuing the nation’s genuine interest. Even Japanese medieval war-lords who were used to making cold, Machiavellian calculations realised that they could not disregard ‘Divine Providence’. The dominance of those who forget the public interest and pursue only their own narrow interests is always short-lived. We who live in the twenty-first century must always keep in mind the common interests of humankind as a whole when defining the national interests.

Second, we must not confuse the end with the means. As was previously stated, the supreme objective of the state is always the survival and happiness of its people, not the reverse. As Mencius in China once said two thousand and several hundred years ago: ‘The people are the most important element in a nation; statehood comes next; the sovereign is the lightest.’² This starting point must never be forgotten. If the end is wrong, all will be for naught. Even worse, if the end is confused for the means and those in power sacrifice the interests of those whom they govern, the errors of totalitarianism will be repeated.

In what follows, let us attempt to define the national interest in its various dimensions. Just as it is difficult for a person who does not know what his/her own interests are to have consistent relations with others in society, it is difficult for a country that does not know its national interests to carry on relations with other countries in a stable manner. Diplomacy begins, first of all, from a firm understanding of one’s national interests.

The national interests are the supreme interests of the state. Specifically, they are security, prosperity and the value system that the state and its people uphold. In Confucius’s Analects, ‘adequate armaments’, ‘adequate food’ and ‘trust in the Heaven’s law embodied by the ruler as Heaven’s agent’ are cited as key to governance.³ These can be translated into modern terms as security, prosperity, and the value system. The essence of the national interests is constant, transcending time and space.

Security

Diplomatic strategy

The number one interest of the state is security. Security means physically protecting the nation from external threats. Those in charge of diplomacy and national security must be highly sensitive to what happens outside their borders, and always be concerned that any external change may or may not pose a threat to their own national security. Mencius stated that for a state, life springs from difficulties and calamities, and death from ease and pleasure.⁴ Like the children playing in a burning house mentioned in the Lotus Sutra, a nation that is indifferent to the dangers around it will inevitably perish.

In modern public international law, a nation is regarded as being comprised of people, a territory and a government. Mencius, too, cited ‘the territory’, ‘the people’ and ‘the government’ as the three precious treasures of a nation.⁵ Today, maritime rights and interests – the continental shelf and a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Series editors’ preface
• Introduction: powerful or powerless? The puzzle of Japanese power
• Part I Japan’s power strategy on the international scene
• Part II The challenges Japan faces
• Part III Internal politics as a source of weakness
• Index