1 Introduction
Paul Midford and Wilhelm Vosse
The puzzle
Ever since Japan regained its independence in 1952 the United States has been overwhelmingly dominant in the country’s security. Even after the two countries concluded a more equal bilateral security treaty in 1960, US dominance over Japan’s security policy continued. Japan can be said to have pursued security isolationism during the Cold War (C.O.E. Oraru: Seisaku kenkyū purojekuto, 2005, p. 11), but the US was always the sole exception to this generalization. Japan hosted US military bases and the SDF held joint exercises with the US military, even while essentially shunning contacts with all other militaries. Japan largely refused even to discuss security with its neighbors, as part of a policy of regional security isolationism. Hideo Ōtake traces Japan’s security isolationism to Yoshida Shigeru, Japan’s early postwar prime minister who devised the nation’s postwar foreign policy strategy (the so-called Yoshida Doctrine). According to Ōtake, Yoshida favored “promoting economic, rather than politico-military integration” (Ōtake, 1990, p. 139).1
Special exceptions were made for the US in otherwise sweeping security policies, such as Tokyo’s three principles on the non-export of weapons, to allow for Japanese military exports to the US, and only to the US. At the same time, even Japan’s territorial defense was dependent on the US. Japan’s first National Defense Program Outline (NDPO) of 1976 set the modest goal of being able to hold of a large-scale invasion until US reinforcements arrived, thereby codifying Japan’s dependence on the US (Sebata, 2010, pp. 107–139). At that same time Japan’s own security policies were reactive to and generally followed the US line. For example, Japan followed the US line of opposing regional security multilateralism (Midford, 2018).
Yet, since the end of the Cold War, and especially since the turn of the century, Japan has been shifting away from relying on the US as its sole security partner. The December 2013 National Security Strategy (NSS), Japan’s first such strategy, codifies this diversification: “In order to overcome national security challenges and achieve national security objectives,” it asserts that “Japan needs to expand and deepen cooperative relationships with other countries.” Although this sentence ends with identifying the Japan-US alliance as the “cornerstone” of Japan’s security strategy (National Security Council of Japan, 2013, p. 14), the NSS’s explicit advocacy of plural partners instead of the previous centering on the US as Japan’s sole security partner represents the codification of the major and largely overlooked shift in Japanese security strategy that this book focuses on. Japan is adding more stones to the US “cornerstone” to build a larger wall that makes up its defense policy.
Three dimensions of this shift represent what in the next chapter defines as decentering (which is not a synonym for weakening of Japan’s security ties with the US): diversifying security ties, removing special carve-outs for the US in security policy, and pursuing security policies that are more self-directed and independent of the US. Tokyo has initiated security dialogues with its Asian neighbors, starting with Russia (originally with the Soviet Union in late 1990) (Hughes, 1996; Midford, 2000, p. 377; Satoh, 2007, p. 99), and assumed a leadership role in promoting regional multilateral security cooperation as at least a supplement to its reliance on the US for security. Tokyo has also begun building bilateral security partnerships with a range of countries and actors, from Australia and India to the European Union. With the European Union and Nordic countries, Japan has pursued counter-piracy cooperation in the Indian Ocean (see the Vosse chapter in this volume), and post-conflict peace-building on land that features militaries and aid agencies working together at the nexus of security and development assistance (Takezawa and Söderberg chapters in this volume; EJARN & KAS, 2012; Midford, 2012). In 2011 Japan lifted its ban on military hardware co-development, production, and export with non-US partners. The US, once the special exception, was no longer special. While the domestic debate on reclaiming the right to collective self-defense had long been defined in terms of coming to the aid of the US in case it came under attack, the recent debate notably shifted toward defending any country Japan has “significant ties” with, thus decentering this debate from an exclusive US focus (see the Wakefield chapter in this volume).2
In short, in a diverse range of areas we can see Japan broadening its security strategy beyond its traditional unidirectional focus on security ties with the US, and toward new multidirectional security partnerships with some partners and actors, and looser forms of security cooperation with other actors. This is not to say that Japan is loosening its security alliance with the US, much less that it should be doing so. Indeed, US and Japanese government officials regularly proclaim a strengthening alliance, an assessment shared by many outside analysts (e.g. Hughes, 2015, pp. 61–70; Oros, 2017, pp. 123–125). Nonetheless, the sum of these changes in diverse areas suggests a coherent pattern or policy of diversifying security partners and thereby reducing the centrality of the US in Japan’s security. To be sure, the US remains Japan’s central security partner, and there is no assumption made in this book that this is about to change. Nonetheless, despite a strengthening alliance the US is now significantly less central than it was 30 years ago when Japan had no other security partners. Japan has gone from having no other security partner, to having a growing list of partners with whom it is progressively deepening ties.
Because the US-Japan alliance has been strong, and indeed strengthening since the end of the Cold War, Japan’s decentering from the US through its diversification of security partners and changes in policy that have made the US less special and dominant has received relatively little attention until recently. This is now changing, with the phenomenon even being raised by newspaper op-ed writers. For example, Michael Macarthur Bosack, writing in The Japan Times describes joint military exercises between the SDF and Australian and Indian counterparts as “unprecedented,” which “would have seemed impossible just a decade ago for the Self-Defense Forces” (Bosack, 2019). He observes, “certainly the Japanese government has made great strides in expanding its portfolio of security partners in recent years,” but then claims in answer to the question of “why” this has happened, that “for years scholars and analysts have repackaged the same answer to that question: Japan is hedging” (Bosack, 2019). In fact, until recently researchers have paid scant attention to Tokyo’s diversification of its security partners, while recent works have considered hedging as only one of several explanations for the new non-US directions in Japan’s security policy, including the hypothesis that this is a means for actually strengthening its broader security cooperation with the US.3 Moreover, as discussed in the next chapter, hedging has a far broader and more nuanced meaning than simply “a country is pursuing opposite policies at the same time in case one should fail” (Bosack, 2019). Nor does the lack of a potential partner who could come close to replacing the US mean that Japan has no incentive to hedge in case of alliance failure. As this book will show, Japan can pursue policies that both hedge against possible alliance failure and at the same time work to strengthen the alliance.
From centering toward decentering
During the Cold War Japan’s security policy was exclusively centered on the US as its sole partner. The SDF only interacted with the US military and scrupulously avoided contacts with non-US militaries. During the Cold War, the SDF was essentially isolated from all other militaries except for the US military. The US Navy sponsored RIMPAC multilateral naval exercise is a striking example. Since it began participating in 1980, Japan had always been paired with participating US navy units; it avoided interaction with non-US navy units. If a third country were assigned to the US-Japan team, the team would be split into two groups so that Japanese military personnel did not work with military personnel from this third country. For Japan, RIMPAC was a bilateral exercise in close proximity to a multilateral one. However, in 1994 Japan began easing its policy of separating the participating Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) contingent from that of countries other than US, allowing cooperation with non-US navies to gradually develop for the first time (Yomiuri Shimbun, 1994).4 Japan’s decision to begin participating in UN Peacekeeping operations, starting with the deployment of the Ground Self-Defense Forces (GSDF) to Cambodia from September 1992 to participate in peacekeeping operations for the UN Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC), was another milestone that significantly reduced SDF isolation from interaction with non-US militaries.5 For the first time this allowed the SDF to experience concrete unit-level cooperation with a military other than that of the US.
Thus, since 1990s SDF interaction with various non-US militaries has begun and increased over time. One important avenue for the SDF has been through initiating Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) with foreign militaries, such as exchanges of naval vessel visits. In 1995 Japan’s Defense Agency issued a “Basic Policy” (kihon hoshin) on CBMs. While emphasizing the continued centrality of the US alliance for Japan’s security, it argued for expanding security dialogue and transparency measures to reduce misperception and build trust. It advocated several measures, including mutual observations of military exercises, exchanges of defense ministry officials, military personnel, education exchanges, ship and other unit exchange visits, joint training for peacekeeping and humanitarian and disaster relief missions (Asahi Shimbun, 1995, March 13, p. 1; Hughes, 1996, p. 234). Engaging in CBMs with potential adversaries is a means for Japan to enhance its security by reducing the threat of conflict through misperception. Japan’s security interactions with China and Russia since the end of the Cold War are the prime examples of this type of engagement. Japan has conducted a variety of confidence-building exchanges with both countries, including track one and two security dialogues, military cadet exchanges, and exchanges between military units and non-combat exercises. Security cooperation with South Korea has also been largely limited to a confidence-building framework.6
With other actors, especially US allies, Japan began building deeper cooperation. From the early 2000s, bilateral military exercises began with US aligned states and actors, starting with Australia. Initially these have been non-combat in nature, but Japan’s recent (now permanent) participation in the multilateral Malabar naval exercises sponsored by India (Gupta, 2016) have increasingly involved combat related exercises. In June 2012, the MSDF for the first time conducted a bilateral exercise with the Indian Navy in waters just off Japan (Ministry of Defense of Japan, 2012).
Another milestone was reached in October 2016, when a Royal Airforce combat squadron arrived from the United Kingdom for the first ever postwar combat exercise held on Japanese soil with a non-US military (Wanklyn, 2016). This led the Asahi Shimbun to claim “Japan is moving toward forming a ‘quasi alliance’ with Britain to complement Tokyo’s security ties with Washington” (Asahi Shimbun, 2016). This exercise with the UK was quickly followed several months later by the arrival in Japan of a French naval vessel for joint exercises with Japanese, British, and US military personnel in Japanese territory and beyond (AFP-Jiji, 2017).
Trade in dual use technology, weapons, and joint development of weapons are an important dimension of security policy where we can see decentering in terms “loss of specialness.” Loss of specialness means concretely that laws and policies are changed in ways that no longer favor the US to the exclusion of all other countries. The leading examples of this loss include the modification of the Three Principles on Arms Exports in 2011 (discussed in Hughes’ chapter in this volume), and the debate on reinterpretation of the constitution to allow the exercise of the right of collective self-defense (see the Wakefield chapter). Regarding the former, although the 1976 version of the Three Principles on Arms Exports essentially banned all weapons exports, this ban was modified in 1983 to allow for weapons exports and joint weapons development with the US,7 thereby making the US the special exception to this otherw...
