With the goal of expanding our understanding of the thinking behind Japanâs foreign policy, this chapter concentrates on four bilateral relationships and distinguishes four different outlooks on Japanâs national identity that can be seen reflected within each relationship. Since the mid 2010s the leaders of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abeâs administration have been responding to abrupt changes in the regional environment and in the all-important Sino-US bilateral relationship. At the same time, they have been searching for clarity about what makes Japan distinctive, looking to various dimensions of national identity, especially historical memory. Recent media coverage has highlighted the symbols of identity that are invoked in bilateral relationships, such as âcomfort women,â the Senkaku Islands, the Northern Territories, âreturn to Asia,â and realization of a ânormal Japan.â Here, I place such symbols within broad dimensions of identity, which I have introduced previously (Rozman 2012), recognizing shared concepts across Japan and contested frameworks as seen in the four outlooks. The aim is to better understand Japanâs foreign policy choices.
Four countries have long been in the forefront of Japanâs foreign policy, and they are also at the center of the way Japanese link bilateral relations to their national identity. Recent developments with each of the four highlight their salience, as Prime Minister Abe, the champion of the revisionist, conservative reconstruction of identity, has strived to use foreign policy as a means to realize a ânormal Japan.â Most important is the United States, under the deep shadow of which Japan has regained only part of its great-power standing during the past seventy years. In 2015 Abe had satisfied most US concerns in how he handled historical memory, and President Barack Obamaâs visit to Hiroshima in May 2016 alongside Abe culminated a process of alliance strengthening; but there is an undercurrent of Japanese dissatisfaction rooted in a search for ânormality.â China stands in second place in Japanese thinking about the outside world, complicating hopes to complete Japanâs âreturn to Asia.â Despite the revival since late 2014 of summit meetings between Abe and President Xi Jinping, China, in the course of events marking the seventieth anniversary of World War II in 2015 and in its ongoing aggressive stance toward the East China Sea and South China Sea, has widened the identity gap between these two countries. In the shadow of these two dominant relationships, Abeâs agreement with South Korean president Park Geun-hye on the âcomfort womenâ issue and pursuit of Russian president Vladimir Putin on the Northern Territories issue focus on two other targets for forging a ânormal Japan,â as bilateral ties are continuously reoriented.
A national identity gapâa concept I proposed (Rozman 2013)âexists when one or both countries in a relationship perceive the other as of great importance for how its people view the past, present, and future of their country, particularly in terms of notions of superiority or inferiority. Japanese have a long record of viewing China and South Korea as playing the âhistory cardâ to make the Japanese feel inferior, of anticipating a breakthrough with Russia to confirm their sense of recovery of national pride, and of feeling dissatisfied with the United Statesâ perceived âbashingâ or âpassingâ Japan without treating it as an equal, and âstiflingâ Japanâs voice in regard to clashing historical memories.
In striving to transform domestic and global thinking about Japanâs wartime record as critical for ânormalcy,â Abeâmore than any other postwar leader of Japanâkeeps in mind how these four countries view that record. Also, in seeking pride in Japanâs postwar and post-Cold War achievements, the judgments of these same countries matter most. Finally, looking to Japanâs place in the region and world in coming decades, Abe cannot but question the degree to which each of these countries may be inclined to forge future-oriented relations or, instead, dredge up reasons for constraining Japanâs prospects. To grasp Japanâs international relations requires including in our analysis its identity gaps with these four most salient counterparts (Rozman 2013, 2014).
National identity can be differentiated into multiple dimensions. For Abe (and others in the revisionist movement that has been gaining ground in public opinion and the National Diet), the temporal dimension is most pronounced, closely tied to the ideological dimension centered on kokutai, or statism. Reinterpreting Japanâs history is deemed vital for renewing aspects of a state-centered or emperor-centered community to which the Japanese must devote themselves. This is an obsession, dating at least from the 1950s, linked to the drive for constitutional revision; and, in its consistency and existence as the starting point for addressing all sorts of issues, it deserves to be viewed as an ideology. A conflicting ideology with comparable staying power, despite diminishing support, is the pacifist outlook, at the opposite end of the political spectrum. This outlook also places emphasis on historical identity, insisting on war guilt and apology as the sine qua non of national identity. Other dimensions of national identityâincluding the vertical dimension centered on stateâsociety relationsâare sharply disputed by these two approaches. One side favors a weak stateâfor example, opposing a state secrets lawâwhile the other is doing what it can to concentrate power and rally the public around symbols of patriotism. In the overall analysis, I also invoke the sectoral dimension (political, economic, and cultural identity), the horizontal dimension, covering attitudes to internationalism and regionalism as well as other external identities, and the intensity dimension, measuring the strength of national identity sentiments. The six dimensions were initially applied to Japan in a chapter that was published in 2012 (Rozman 2012: ch. 1).
For thinking about international relationsâincluding internationalism and regionalismâit is helpful to introduce a typology of orientations found in Japan: 1) revisionism in its fullest form tied to statismâkokkashugi; 2) revisionism focused on ethnic nationalismâminzokushugi; 3) internationalism based on realismâkokusaishugi; and 4) pacifism in full denial of realism and of taking international responsibilityâheiwashugi (Rozman 2015a). Below, these four approaches are applied to foreign relations, with stress on the national identity gaps that were discerned in the mid 2010s with the United States, China, South Korea, and Russia.1 Pursuit of any of these isms can serve the goal of showcasing Japanâs superiority, but internationalism separate from pacifism leaves Japan in the shadow of the United States.
Tightening the JapanâUS alliance in the shadow of lingering anti-Americanism
The JapanâUS relationship appears to be a bulwark of internationalism (kokusaishugi). Summits produce joint statements replete with praise for universal values and insistence on abiding by the rule of law. Both states are democracies, which for seventy years have expressed shared outlooks on threats to the international order. In 2013â16 they found common cause on such issues as condemnation of human rights abuses in North Korea and affirmation of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Even on sensitive matters such as the way imperial Japan treated US prisoners of war and the fact of US atomic bombs dropped on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unprecedented moves toward reconciliation were highlighted. Yet Abeâs visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in December 2013 and repeated criticism of Barack Obama in the Japanese media, as well as criticisms of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump (Country Report: Japan 2016) that gave Japanese license to intensify warnings about US relations (unreliable ally, unequal partner, narrow-minded state, selfish state without the will to stand firm on East Asian challenges), signal doubt about how much internationalism really is the driving force on the Japanese side. A leading Japanese academic has warned that in the war era and today as well the lack of internationalism has posed a serious problem in foreign relations (Hosoya 2012b). He has argued that Japan misunderstood pre-war internationalism, as if only imperialism ruled the world, and it has been very slow to assume responsibility for global challenges, such as the recent rise of ISIS, letting public opinion steer it to a very limited geopolitical role. This is in line with warnings in the 1980s of insufficient kokusaika, or internationalization, at a time when Japan confidently sought a new role (Rozman 1992).
Assertions that US support for internationalism is deficient open space for alternative approaches to national identity, especially for heiwashugi. They cast doubt on the United States in various ways. Objections to Trump failing to uphold American standards of internationalism echoed comments around the world, including in the United States, even as they served to divert attention from Japanâs own failure to uphold them. Many in Japan had insisted that Obamaâs weak leadership (no longer the worldâs policeman, slowness in countering Chinaâs aggressiveness, etc.) also meant that the United States could no longer be the leader it had been. Fear of outright isolationism under a Trump presidency carried this concern much further. Yet the passing of new laws in 2014â15, including those that gave Japan the right to collective self-defense, boosted the sense that heiwashugi was no longer dominant and kokusaishugi was gaining ground. In the first four decades of the postwar era heiwashugi prevailed, but it was losing ground, especially from the 1990s (Togo 2010). However, there was still fear of being entrapped into a US confrontation or war, and it remained a formidable force in opposition to the growing prospects after the July 2016 Upper House elections that Abe would seek to amend Japanâs constitution, especially Article Nine renouncing war and broadly prohibiting preparations for it. Given US efforts since the Korean War to turn Japan into a full ally with an unambiguous sense of responsibility for the international system (Green 2001), the struggle against pacifism has been closely linked to US pressure (gaiatsu). Despite reservations, kokusaishugi is seen as supportive of a closer JapanâUS alliance; its spread greatly boosts the alliance. At times when the alliance is troubled, it is most desired (Inoguchi, Ikenberry and Sato 2011).
Official policy and public opinion in Japan strongly support the JapanâUS alliance, but this does not mean that anti-Americanism is absent from national identity. Rather, it takes more indirect forms than in most countries, having a long pedigree from the postwar era.
The prevailing global image of Japan since the 1950s has been of a pro-American ally with a progressive movement critical of the JapanâUS alliance but losing clout, and a right wing opposed to US thinking on the history of World War II but remaining a small fringe. In those two camps, especially the cultural intellectuals on the left and the supporters of rebuilding Japanâs military on the right, there was relatively little animus toward Americans and increasing recognition of the salience of special JapanâUS relations. Few observers in recent times have given much credence to sentiments that could be called âanti-Americanismâ in a Japanese populace accustomed to calling itself part of the âfree worldâ with âuniversal valuesâ and heavily dependent on an alliance with the United States for its security and its diplomacy around the world or in Asia. Yet it would be a mistake, as Japanese scholarship argues, to overlook the identity clash from the left and the right (Reizei 2016).
Anti-Americanism on the left was seen in the sympathy for the Soviet Union in the 1950s before the revelations of de-Stalinization, for China during the Cultural Revolution and after normalization of relations, and for regionalism in the 1990sâ2000s as an alternative to exclusive dependency on the United States. On the right, there were other sources of anti-Americanismâsome of which resonated with the political left as well. The quest for a strong state not limited by some elements of civil society was meant to undo effects of the US occupation after World War II. Contrasts with the US model of capitalism and litigation pointed to community, harmony, and an inherent homogeneity and hierarchy. When the Obama administration pressed Japan to reduce agricultural protectionism in order to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), this revived suspicions of a US threat to Japanâs internal order and to rebuilding the kokutai (state-centered national polity). From the perspective of minzokushugi, there is also a sense that the United States is posing a civilizational threat. Thus, when the Japanese regained confidence in the 1980s following decades of grappling with the aftermath of defeat, the most popular expression of pride took the form of Nihonjinron (theory of Japaneseness), with its insistence on the superiority of Japanese culture from time immemorial (Befu 2001), in sharp contrast to the widely seen deficiencies in the supposedly declining US civilization. Although Japanese confidence slipped after the âbubble economyâ burst, contrasts with US national identity persisted.
Awareness among international observers of Japanese discontent with the United States and its policies has focused on specific moments in time, not on persistent themes. Anti-war, anti-alliance demonstrations leading to the 1960 showdown, followed by the student movement of the late 1960s were on the radar even as...
