Rethinking Japanese Security

Internal and External Dimensions

Peter J. Katzenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415773942
• eBook ISBN: 9781135976934
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the unexpected end of the Cold War, standard arguments about power politics can no longer be adopted uncritically. This has led to a renewed interest in Japan's unusually peaceful security policy.

Japan's championing of "comprehensive security" is central to this collection. Peter J. Katzenstein's essays explore this concept which not only encompasses traditional military concerns but also domestic aspects of security. The book's focus on counter-terrorism and national security highlights a policy approach which, over decades, Japan has developed with political patience and diplomatic finesse. These essays advocate an eclectic approach that helps in recognizing new questions and that seek to combine elements from different analytical perspectives in the exploration of novel lines of argument.

Additionally, the book features an entirely new, substantial introduction that explores and elaborates the themes of the collection while bringing it up to date. This collection will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Japanese politics, security studies and international relations.

1 Japanese security in perspective

Peter J. Katzenstein (2007) ¹

Throughout the Cold War, the analysis of Japanese security was a topic largely overlooked by both American students of Japan and students of national security. Japan, after all, was the country that had adopted a Peace Constitution with its famous Article 9 interpreted as legally banning the use of armed force in the defense of national objectives. Its professional military had little public standing and was under the thumb of civilians. And its grand strategy aimed at gaining prestige as a civilian power. Japan sought to leverage its economic prowess to a position of regional and perhaps global leadership that would complement rather than rival that of the United States; at the same time Japan relied on continued protection by the U.S. military. To be sure, since the late 1970s the U.S. government had persistently pressed Japan to play a larger regional role in Asia and to spend more of its rapidly growing GDP on national defense. But Japan made no more than marginal concessions. On security issues it kept a low regional profile, and since the late 1980s Japanese defense spending had consistently stayed below 1 percent of GDP. Writing on problems of Japanese national security was thus left to policy specialists issuing regular conference reports on the ups and downs of the U.S.–Japan bilateral defense relationship. Theoretically informed scholarship was conspicuous by its absence.

Things have changed a great deal. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the 9/11 attacks have fundamentally transformed the international landscape. Having failed in understanding the political dynamics that led to the end of the Cold War, some specialists of national and international security turned their attention from the western to the eastern perimeter of the Euro-Asian land mass. Would not the rapid rise of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, the newly industrializing economies in Southeast Asia, China and Vietnam yield fertile ground for the application of the timeless truths of realist theory? As peace was breaking out in Europe, was Asia not destined to get ready for war (Friedberg 1993/94)?

Yet war and ethnic cleansing returned to Europe in the 1990s, while Asia remained peaceful. Thought to be unstoppable in the 1980s, Japan’s economic juggernaut foundered on more than a decade of economic stagnation. China’s economy continued to grow annually by about 8–10 percent, creating new security dynamics in East Asia as well as between East Asia and the United States. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 illustrated how closely Asia’s economic miracle had become linked to regional and global markets. It also showed how, with the exception of Indonesia’s, Asian leaders skillfully maneuvered out of that crisis in a very short time. The attack of September 11 and the U.S. global war on terror increased regional concerns about the rise of al Qaeda (Chow 2005; Leheny 2005). More importantly, it elevated the political importance of North Korea as a member of what President Bush called “the axis of evil,” comprising countries that were suspected of trading in the illicit international market for nuclear technology and thus enhancing the risk that weapons of mass destruction could end up in the hands of groups intent on large-scale violence.

The developments in Japan’s and East Asia’s security affairs are analyzed in this book from a perspective that is oriented toward theory development more than toward policy formation or historical clarification. In contrast to the analysis of many scholars of international relations who organize their writings along paradigmatic lines, such as realism or liberalism, this book opens and closes with two chapters which make a case for the fruitfulness of an eclectic approach, not as a substitute but as a complement to well-established styles of analysis. The book is also eclectic in a broader understanding of that term. Chapters 4, 6, 7, and 9 deal with counterterrorism, traditionally a neglected and unfashionable topic in the field of security studies—until the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC.

Specialists in national security had remained blind to the fact that state security could be threatened by non-state actors, and in many cases was. Since the late 1960s Japan had been a prime case for studying the volatile politics of terrorism and counterterrorism. For example, driven by a combustible mixture of millenarian religious politics, members of Aum Shinrikyo, a New Age religious movement, staged a massive attack on civilians in downtown Tokyo in 1995. For attacks they hoped to launch later, some members of Aum Shinrikyo even took lessons in Florida’s flight schools. Briefly told in Chapter 9, this story is as sad as it is ironic. Al Qaeda’s attack should not have come as a total surprise to scholars of national security. Japan’s presumed marginality for an understanding of national security in the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be rooted in a wrong-headed conventional wisdom. With very few exceptions (Hughes 1998), an entire field of scholarship, and the torrent of policy advice it so freely offered, had missed the obvious. Eclecticism, broadly understood, this book suggests, may help in diminishing just a little the risks scholars and policymakers run of being totally blind-sided by events.

This introductory chapter reviews briefly some theoretical issues in the analysis of Japanese security (Part 1), places Japan in the broader context of the American imperium (Part 2), discusses Japan’s relationship with China (Part 3), and concludes with a brief preview of the chapters included in this book (Part 4).

1 Japanese security and analytical eclecticism

Since the end of the Cold War, scholarship on Japan’s security affairs has become theoretically more self-conscious. I credit three interrelated developments. First, the end of the Cold War compelled scholars of international relations to re-examine some basic assumptions that had informed the field of national and international security. That process of re-examination made it impossible to adopt standard realist arguments uncritically. Second, the economic rise of East Asia made compelling a definition of security that, besides traditional military concerns, encompassed also economic and social aspects of security. Students of national security no longer dismiss “comprehensive security” as a slogan behind which Japanese politicians seek cover for their reputedly meager defense efforts. Finally, the theoretical challenge that constructivist and sociological writings posed to the mainstream of both realist and liberal theorizing was particularly strong in the field of Japanese security affairs. For most students of international relations, concepts such as norms and identity were linked either to an outmoded tradition of area studies or to an unwelcome cultural turn in the social sciences. These students were not eager to rethink the premises on which they had based the analysis of national and international security. Yet, unexpectedly, the politics of Japanese security has reinforced the relevance of these concepts, which can enrich analyses that favor the traditional categories of interest and power politics.

In the analysis of Japanese security the initial resistance to the broadening of the theoretical spectrum was readily apparent. While some analysts were trying to break new ground by stressing the importance of norms and identities (Katzenstein 1996; Berger 1998), realist and liberal analyses of Japanese security policy and Asian security orders by and large chose to focus on other issues (Heginbotham and Samuels 1998; Mochizuki and O’Hanlon 1998). Although this is not the place to provide a detailed review, this evolution of the literature had a welcome benefit. Scholarship on Japanese security successfully sidestepped metatheoretical debates among adherents of different research traditions—a welcome contrast to many general studies of international relations (Green 1998). As a result, some writings on Japanese security may, in the future, be able to take a more eclectic turn, by incorporating elements drawn from three different styles of analysis—the testing of alternative explanations, the rendering of synthetic accounts, and historically informed narratives.

My own book on the subject (Katzenstein 1996), for example, illustrates the first of these three styles of analysis. It offers a sociologically informed analysis of the centrality of norms and identity in Japan’s internal and external security policy, and evaluates it against two alternative accounts—a realist analysis of Japan’s external security policy and a liberal analysis of Japan’s internal security policy. Before 9/11, realism had no interest in internal security policy—one reason for the enormous gap that proponents of this approach have had to cover since 9/11. On questions of internal security, liberalism with its exclusive focus on “thin” regulatory norms and the norms-based explanation that I develop, which also encompasses “thick” constitutive norms, cannot be distinguished clearly. All the norms that operate in this case point toward a flexible policy. On questions of internal security the anti-Leftist bias in Japan’s constitutive norm of collective identity was uncontested; social and legal norms were mutually reinforcing; and internationally Japan was passive, seeking to maximize tactical flexibility. Japan’s policy of external security is largely shaped by factors that do not figure prominently in realist analysis with its focus on rational, unitary actors that compete in an anarchic international system through strategies of balancing or bandwagoning. Liberal analysis does take account of norms. But by focusing solely on thin regulatory norms and failing to analyze also thick constitutive norms it does not capture the striking difference in the economic and military dimensions of Japan’s external security policy. In Japanese domestic politics norms operate to very different effect in economic and military domains. Uncontested norms of economic security are rooted in a shared collective identity of Japan as a highly vulnerable country; this produces enormous flexibility in policy. In sharp contrast, a conservative mainstream and a vigorous Leftist camp hotly contested the norms informing Japan’s military security, and this accounts for a high degree of policy rigidity. While a liberal and a norms-based explanation are pointing in the same direction on questions of internal security, on questions of external security they point in opposite directions. And a norms-based explanation clearly has more explanatory power than a liberal one. In sum, for central aspects of Japan’s security policy, realist and liberal styles of analysis leave central elements unexamined or fail to explain some of their most important aspects. Other authors have adopted this explanatory approach, some with more success (Twomey 2000) than others (Lind 2004).

The main intent in the testing of alternative explanations is to identify a concrete political problem and evaluate the explanatory strength of different perspectives or hypotheses. This move signals an important step away from both the metatheoretical clashes that consumed international-relations theorists in the 1990s, and the often unreflective realist or Marxist bias in much of the writing on Japanese security during the Cold War.

Yet this explanatory approach also has costs. It risks coding and interpreting data in a way that suits the epistemological and methodological presuppositions of a given perspective and thus offers no more than a partial snapshot. More importantly, especially in its problem specification, authors tend to set up the analysis in a way that favors their preferred approach over all others. The particular strength of distinctive analytical perspectives is, after all, to illuminate what puzzles us about the world. The way research questions are posed often emerges from the presumption of a given analytical perspective rather than from the world of politics. A smart researcher can frame the research question in a way that determines the answer.

Richard Samuels’s (2007) magisterial account of Japanese security exemplifies a second, synthetic style of analysis. It shows none of the self-conscious deployment of analytical categories that characterizes attempts at developing and testing alternative explanations. Instead Samuels mixes freely a variety of different perspectives—international and domestic, realist and constructivist, discursive and coalitional. His narrative is well specified; it is deeply grounded in the analysis of Japanese domestic politics; it avoids conflation of categories; and it is highly nuanced. Yet, for all these admirable strengths, Samuels’s analysis pays a price. In tracking the various strands of Japanese strategic doctrines over time, his analysis cannot help but leave unexamined a broad range of Japan’s security challenges that these schools consider to be unimportant. In fairness to the author, his rather than the reader’s interest should dictate what he chooses to study. And Samuels’s historical analysis does illustrate how successful Japanese leaders have been in the past in adapting a limited number of ideas and strategic concepts in mastering a broad range of volatile international conditions. Yet it is striking how the discursive moves of the mainstream and anti-mainstream in various strategic traditions—Meiji Japan’s “Rich Nation, Strong Army,” Konoe’s “New Order,” and the Yoshida Doctrine of the cheap ride of democratic Japan after 1945—so carefully tracked in this book are remarkably narrow in what they have to say about the full range of Japan’s contemporary security challenges. Terrorism, the environment and human security, for example, are not to be found in an analysis that distinguishes between contemporary Japan’s normal nationalists, middle-power internationalists, new autonomists, neo-revisionists, realists, globalists, mercantilists, Asianists, and pacifists (Samuels 2007: 14). Noting these blind spots, and addressing their political causes and consequences, would have broadened the book’s range. Considering the most important developments since the end of the Cold War in the international security environment, Samuels’s rich account is a triumph of “old” security studies over “new” security issues.

While the book is superb in generalizing about Japanese security doctrine across time, it sidesteps an opportunity to place Japan in a comparative perspective. This is an important difference between synthetic analysis and analytical eclecticism. Since the book aims to give a definitive account of a particular slice of Japanese politics, for Samuels comparison is beside the point. Analytical eclecticism is more modest in its aspirations. It relies on comparison to discover new things about the world. Whatever the reason for this difference, the attentive reader is left with an analysis that makes Japan seem unique rather than distinctive—a view that, based on Samuels’s other writings, is clearly not his own, even though, based on my own interviews with Japanese officials over the years, it is a view quite common among Japanese political and bureaucratic elites. The political consequence of this fact could be substantial. If Japan is unique, perhaps Japanese policymakers experience great crises with a special sense of loneliness that is spared elites in other countries who experience the rise and fall of national fortunes in a broader context.

Japan’s self-defined sense of vulnerability is a subject that looms large in Samuels’s account. Yet this condition is hardly unique to Japan. Stubbs (1999, 2005), Zhu (2000, 2002), and Larsson (2007) have applied the same concept to explain a variety of outcomes in Asia, and I have tried to do the same for the small European states (Katzenstein 1985). Is there some distinctive quality to the experience of vulnerability tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Japanese security in perspective
• 2 Japan, Asian-Pacific security, and the case for analytical eclecticism
• PART I Japan’s internal and external security policies
• PART II Japanese and Asian security in comparative perspective
• PART III Analytical eclecticism and security