Japan's Relations with North Korea and the Recalibration of Risk

Ra Mason

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415728836
• eBook ISBN: 9781317915829
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

North Korea's contemporary relations with Japan have been fraught with tension. Tactics employed by Pyongyang have included abductions of Japanese citizens, missile launches over Japanese territory, intrusions into Japanese sovereign waters, and nuclear tests in defiance of Japanese and international condemnation. In light of the security risk the DPRK poses, this book examines how the state, market, and society in Japan have framed North Korea as a salient evil, and have in turn constructed and manipulated the risks posed by their neighbour.

Using the example of Japan's post-Cold War responses to North Korea, this book studies the concept of risk in international relations, and its interactive relationship with domestic civil society. It focuses on how security risks are identified and re-evaluated by policy makers, mass media, and civil society stakeholders, and in doing so disentangles the complex processes by which Japan has framed and recalibrated risks in response to the DPRK. By exploring how risks identified with Pyongyang's behaviour towards Japan have been mediated between the state, market, and society via mainstream discourse in Japan, Ra Mason highlights the way in which these processes are causally linked to key actors' conceptions of risk. Indeed, this book provides an original theoretical framework – distinguishing between risk and traditional threat perceptions – through which to address issues of national security and identity, as well as the norms which inform them.

Japan's Relations with North Korea and the Recalibration of Risk will be welcomed by students and scholars across a wide range of fields including Japanese politics, Asia-Pacific studies, international relations, and security studies.

1 Understanding risk in Japan’s international relations

As stated in the Introduction, this book is premised upon the idea that there is a conceptual gap in the relevant literature covering Japan’s responses to North Korea. To fill this, an improved theoretically informed approach, empirically applied through use of what might be termed an enhanced methodological toolkit, is required. Such a methodology can be engineered to unlock an effective understanding of how ultimately significant the conception, mediation, and recalibration of risk is to Japan’s relationship with (and framing of) North Korea. First, however, attention is turned to the application of International Relations (IR). IR paradigms are influential at the level of both policy formation and, though more indirectly, comprehension within the mass media and civil society as a whole. Hence, before discussing how a more sophisticated application of risk in IR is to be realized, first it is necessary to explain why the existing scholarship is, ultimately, deemed unsatisfactory. This discussion begins with a critique of (neo)realism.

Why the ‘holy trinity’ is not enough: (neo)realism, (neo)liberalism, constructivism

Neo-realist arguments have faced a number of paradigm-shaking challenges in recent years, particularly following the end of the Cold War, as politicians, business leaders, and academics have sought to find alternatives to the confrontational rigidity of an anarchic, state-centric, super-structure at both regional and global levels. Both liberalism/neo-liberalism and constructivism have been influential theories in facilitating this challenge to realism, and the latter is particularly key to understanding the process by which the (re)calibration and governance risks has become so central IR. However, for now, the nation-state remains the primary unit of analysis in international relations, and as such a powerful contingent of realist thought remains among influential actors and scholars, who continue to promulgate the reality of a system based on the anarchic self-help state.

One point of particular concern to Japan and Japanese sources regarding how current regional international relations are evaluated in this regard, however, has been the lack of a Japan/Korea focus in leading realist texts. In other words, Japan, South Korea, and the DPRK are often relegated to the role of subsidiary territory that is to be dominated by either the United States or China, and are perceived only as instrumental to the broader systemic struggle for, and balance of, power between these larger states. This strand of appraisal is exemplified by John J. Mearsheimer’s assessment of the core security issues in East Asia as essentially a competition for regional dominance between the US and China. He offers the following symptomatic analysis:

If … China becomes … the world’s wealthiest great power it would almost certainly use its wealth to build a mighty military machine. For sound strategic reasons, moreover, it would surely pursue regional hegemony, just as the United States did in the western hemisphere during the nineteenth century. So if Chinese relative power grows substantially, one should expect it to attempt to dominate Japan and South Korea, as well as other regional actors, by building military forces that are so powerful that those other states would not dare challenge it.

(Mearsheimer, 2001: 57)

A number of prominent scholars, political analysts, and military experts, though they may see it as more complex, at least agree on Mearsheimer’s conclusion that realist explanations offer the most empirically convincing theoretical approach for describing the dynamics of international affairs relating to the Korean peninsula. As Gabriel Jonsson simply states, “[t]he United States, China, Japan and Russia have all had their own interests to pursue in their policies towards Korea” (Jonsson, 2006: 216).

The result of this pursuit, however, encounters serious conceptual difficulties when realist analyses set out to demonstrate, the less than logically coherent argument that increases in military capabilities, specifically for Japan to counter North Korean threats, will result in greater national, regional, and global security. This position is epitomized by Ōta Fumio, who devotes a considerable section of his security analysis to the alleged gravity of potential harms posed to Japan by Pyongyang’s military capabilities, concluding that enhanced militarization and band-wagoning with the US are the most effective means by which to secure Tokyo’s safety and establish regional harmony (Ōta, 2006: 117–22). Such postulations do, however, highlight in rudimentary terms how the influence of realist thinking is well suited to facilitating the upward recalibration of risks and shaping of how Japan should take responsibility for them; particularly through the framing of the DPRK as a source of salient and ominous threats—which become internalized as risks.

Realist discourse of this kind is, therefore, a perspective that is likely to heighten Japan’s sense of insecurity in the East Asian region, and is compatible with the Japanese state justifying a heightening of risk perception in relation to Pyongyang. Indeed, a number of Japanese scholars and specialists in Japan’s foreign policy continue to assess responses to the DPRK, and the risks that it poses, in terms of realist-based strategic concerns. These tend to stress the important role that the Japanese state has to play in regional affairs affected by North Korea. This means that, although potential economic gains for the DPRK are expressed as a primary factor in Pyongyang’s manoeuvers, they are observed with caution and the understanding that any such agenda is driven by the power-political imperative of regime survival. Such an outlook is typified by Michishita Narushige, who evaluates Japan’s options vis-à-vis Pyongyang by warning against being drawn into a North Korean-engineered game of competition over the future geopolitical and economic battleground that will likely dominate Korean affairs. Indeed he states that:

Normalization of relations with the United States and Japan would be the single most important turning point for North Korea’s security and foreign policy strategy. If this is achieved, North Korea’s regime survival would be significantly enhanced.

In this new strategic environment, North Korea would benefit from the reconfigured equidistance policy … Regional rivalry between China and Japan, and South Korea’s concern that their influence over the northern part of the peninsula might become too strong would benefit Pyongyang. If North Korea provides appropriate incentives, it might be able to draw Russia into this game as well … The Japanese input would be particularly important because the Japanese have a lot of money but do not pose a political threat to the legitimacy of the North Korean regime.¹

(Michishita, 2009: 115–17)

In addition to the kind of defensive-realist analysis provided by security experts the like of Michishita, there is also an emerging realist-rooted understanding amongst some schools of thought that Japan’s framing of risk pertaining to North Korea is part of an unavoidable alignment within a strategic regional policy framework, referred to by Michael J. Green as “Japan’s reluctant realism” (2001). Green notes a tangible shift in Japan’s risk-mediation strategy at the level of national foreign policy over preceding decades, highlighting the clear transition from an “omnidirectional, risk-free formula that suggested no national strategy at all” (2001: 1) to one which, not least because of the increased security threat from North Korea,² the rise of China, and external pressure and a degree of abandonment from the United States, has prompted Japan into “more sharing of the risk” (2001: 10) in strategic terms. A key element of this is how North Korea is framed by Japan within the regional balance of power, as a prominent and probable source of risks attached to tangible harms, such as those contained in potential nuclear or other military aggression by the DPRK. Indeed, Richard Samuels concisely expresses how Japan’s North Korea policy has been structured to this affect. In a somewhat cynical passage he asserts that:

If the cultish regime in North Korea had not existed, some Japanese strategists surely would have wished to invent it. It was easy for the Japanese public to perceive Pyongyang’s militarism and persistent provocations as a threat – one much less ambiguous than China’s, which was, after all, encased in considerable economic benefit.

(Samuels, 2007: 171)

Thus, where Green stresses the unavoidable nature of strategically orientated moves by Japan, including those which maintain a high-risk evaluation of North Korean issues, Samuels posits that there is a high degree of independent reactive planning by the Japanese state apparatus in such endeavours. ³ Either way, both point towards realist-informed directives that are indicative of a tactical recalibration of risk, which includes the public framing of the DPRK as a source of serious, potentially imminent, harms.

From the perspective of this book, however, there are serious limitations to realist/neo-realist perspectives which make them problematic. Not least, this is because of their lack of an apt ability to effectively describe and account for domestic political concerns within Japan—specifically in relation to the DPRK. Indeed, this is of particularly key relevance when assessing the processes of how North Korea is framed among core sections of Japan’s policy community in order to justify and facilitate national policy prescriptions. Put simply, there are more nuanced non-state pressures and domestic market interests which have led to a harder line by Tokyo vis-à-vis Pyongyang—followed by the current equilibrium—during the post-Cold War era, as well as the state-level tactical factors explained by neo-realism.

Classical liberal political theories and their derivatives, such as neo-liberalism and neo-liberal institutionalism, offer a potentially much less exclusively state-centric and more domestically integrated means by which to assess foreign policies and national responses to external states than their realist rivals can provide. At the very minimum, they help to provide an explanation of why, for instance, there is continuing salience to the theme of sporadic attempts by Japan to normalize politico-economic relations with North Korea. Furthermore, liberal lines of argument can be more applicable than neo-realist perspectives because they exclude less the role of a number of domestic influences within the state, market, and society. These include various media and other business interests, as well as pressure groups and sub-state or supra-state political authorities.

Scholars in the ilk of Funabashi Yōichi et al., for instance, advocate implementation of increased institutional dominance, through bodies such as the United Nations (UN), Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Group of Seven (G7 (G8)), and International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) as a means to mediate Japan’s nationally salient risks through international institutions (Funabashi, 1994: 22–5).

However, through the course of the past decade, repeated failure of such organizations to effectively deal not least with the core issues associated with North Korea, has undoubtedly aided those agents within Japan that would wish to frame the DPRK as a high-risk “rogue state” which is beyond the bounds of internationally implemented restraint. ⁴ Nevertheless, for some purveyors of liberal-oriented lines of thinking, such as Katahara Eiichi, for example, Japan’s international role, particularly in non-nuclear proliferation efforts, is a key factor of how North Korea is framed. Hence, to this effect, the risks of nuclear armament in “rogue states,” and indeed caution over Japan’s own nuclear aspirations as a response, need to be extrapolated from other conflated issues, and emphasis placed on the financial incentives of normalization and regional cooperation (Katahara, 1998: 30–6). In other words, preventative action, based on the incremental and conditional provision of economic incentives in return for large-scale politico-economic liberalization within the DPRK, is prescribed as a means by which Japan can both accurately calibrate and effectively respond to risks identified as rooted in Pyongyang (Takeda, 1998: 97). This is also well expressed by Christopher Hughes (1999), who establishes that Japan has been in a position to use its economic power to, potentially, alleviate security risks posed by the DPRK, normalize relations, and aid in the endeavour of increasing prosperity on both sides of the northern Japan Sea. Yet, in Hughes’ view, attributed to the decisions or pressures brought to bear on the iron triangle of the former long-term ruling LDP, bureaucracy, and big business, which have oft-times been accounted for as constituting Japan’s policy elite, Tokyo did not chose to do so (1999: 161). Moreover, key structural obstacles such as Japan’s need to align foreign policy with the US, an inability to resolve the abduction issue, as well as anti-Pyongyang-focused domestic media and negat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note on translations, Romanization, and Diet references
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding risk in Japan’s international relations
• 2 Japan and the DPRK after the Cold War: a new risk?
• 3 Build-up and response to the Taepodong 1
• 4 Spy-boats and summits: diversifying risks
• 5 Risk conflation: missiles and nuclear tests
• 6 Reinforced framing: North Korea as high-risk
• 7 Fixed framing: new government, old responses
• 8 Recent events: a new equilibrium
• 9 Conclusion: mediating and maintaining the risks
• Glossary of Japanese terms
• Index