Japanese Geopolitics and the Western Imagination

Atsuko Watanabe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030043988
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030043995
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica asiatica

This book is the first attempt to comprehensively introduce Japanese geopolitics. Europe's role in disseminating knowledge globally to shape the world according to its standards is an unchallenged premise in world politics. In this story, Japan is regarded as an enthusiastic importer of the knowledge. The book challenges this ground by examining how European geopolitics, the theory of the modern state, traveled to Japan in the first half of the last century, and demonstrates that the same theory can invoke diverged imaginations of the world by examining a range of historical, political, and literary texts. Focusing on the transformation of power, knowledge, and subjectivity in time and space, Watanabe provides a detailed account to reconsider the formation of contemporary world order of the modern territorial states.

                            

© The Author(s) 2019

Atsuko WatanabeJapanese Geopolitics and the Western ImaginationCritical Security Studies in the Global Southhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04399-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Standing in a Place, Imagining a Space

Atsuko Watanabe¹

(1)

Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Atsuko Watanabe

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The adjective “abnormal” is often used to describe Japan in the context of world politics. Some may see this as a mere self-branding or an out-of-date stereotype. However, it has been widely used not only in scholarly analyses but also in broader geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses until today. At the same time, Japan is more often than not labeled as a “model” to which the non-Western world should aspire. An interesting consequence of this ambivalent identification of Japan is that it has contributed to the construction of fault lines in world politics. This has been the case at least until quite recently when China as another “abnormal great power” (Huang 2015) has come to attract attention.

To illustrate, in a 2003 speech at the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment of Democracy, the then US President George W. Bush claimed, “[s]ome skeptics of democracy assert that the traditions of Islam are inhospitable to the representative government. This “cultural condescension,” as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would ‘never work’” (National Endowment for Democracy 2003; see also Dower 2011: 14). Here, Japan is drawn as the first example to attest the validity of American promotion of democracy. Throughout the American War on Terror, Japan was frequently referred to. Osama Bin Laden compared his attack on the World Trade Center to the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, whereas American media wrote that the same attack invoked Americans Pearl Harbor, which started the Pacific War in 1941. In the meantime, the renowned historian John Dower criticized the Bush administration daring to equate it to Imperial Japanese government (Dower 2011, 2012). In this way, Japan has acted as a gatekeeper, if not “the front office” (Jackson 2009: 57), of the West and/or modernity.

Japan’s exceptionalism is a geopolitical question, which is at a glance fairly extraneous to real geography. Whether Japan is part of the West or not is, at least for Japanese specialists, a recurrent puzzle. Patrick Jackson (2006), calling such a fanciful geopolitical imagination the “West Pole Fallacy,” asserts that “the West is a very decentralized and disorganized actor” and there is “no organization or individual uniquely endowed with the authority to speak and act in its name—and hence no central court of appeals to which potential Western actors can be referred to determine whether or not they are acceptable” (Jackson 2009: 57). Despite the fact that the West has no territoriality like a sovereign state, Jackson claims, “any claimant has an already-existing historical tradition on which to draw when articulating a specific instantiation of the West in their specific local context” (ibid.: 58). Japan, then, is a claimant as well as respondent in spite of the fact that it shares no geographical and historical tradition with any “Western” country. Japan’s true “freakishness” (Hopf 2018) is that it belongs to nowhere but is situated on the fault line of East and West, and perhaps even of South and North, if not an independent civilization as categorized by Samuel Huntington (1996; see also Umesao 1967).

This evolution of kaleidoscopic Japanese identification has happened, perhaps paradoxically, in tandem with the global proliferation of Western “scientific” knowledge since the eighteenth century on the one hand, having the regression of geographical perception that accompanies it on the other. The narrative begins with the arrival of the US black ships in 1853, symbolizing Western technology. As a reaction, Japan, which had adopted an isolationist policy until then, established the first non-Western modern nation-state, assertively assimilating Western political institutions. It was the period when the well-known Japanese enlightenment thinker Yukichi Fukuzawa¹ wrote his famous Datsu-A-Ron (de-Asianization thesis), which was first published in 1885, and his seminal An Outline of Theory of Civilization (Fukuzawa 1995, 2009: Watanabe 2018). In 1905, Japan won the Russo-Japanese War. It was said that, having introduced the European military system and financially supported by American capitalists, Japan joined the circle of Great Powers. This victory, however, brought Japan a mighty depression.

During the Taishō period (1912–1926), Japan domestically pursued democracy. It was said of the period that prewar Japan was in a sense the most democratic and Westernized. Following Taichirō Mitani (1974: 8), this was when Japanese people tried to re-define what “the state” meant. In the mid-1930s when Japan launched the Asia-Pacific War, however, many intellectuals began to assert that Japan must return to Asia, the East (Tōyō )—or part of Tō-a (East Asia). This debate insisted on overcoming the West, modernity, and science. The irony was that it was the fruit of Western science that made Japan decide to accept an unconditional surrender in 1945: the atomic bombs. Throughout the subsequent US occupation and (re)democratization, Japan was reabsorbed into the West. One of the decisive intellectual events that oriented the discourse of exception is evidenced in 1949, when the Historical Science Society (Rekishigaku Kenkyūkai) had its general conference theme of the year “the general law of history.” Regretting the wartime discourse in which many scholars asserted that Asian states including Japan were historically different from European states, the conference claimed that from that time onward, Asia should be analyzed as “exception” of European law (Tōyama 1966). Another irony for Japan was that it was during this period that the world saw the rise of nationalism in non-Western countries. Nonetheless, in the discipline of International Relations (IR), this revisionist move caused no conflict until quite recently, and possibly, even now. As the debate circles around Japan’s postwar security arrangement, with which the state entrusts at least nominally its whole defense to the United States, and that cannot be neatly explained with the framework of territorial sovereignty, its focus has been on whether Japan’s behavior is abnormal. To be sure, there have been different perspectives; constructivists tend to argue that the standard of abnormality is an (inter-subjective) social construction (see Hook et al. 2005; Hagström 2015) in contrast to a realist perspective which is likely to lead to a black-or-white judgment. Despite the difference in perspectives, Japan is still treated as an exception. Thus, in a sense, it is Western science that has brought this permeable geopolitical identification as part of the West to Japan. At the same time, however, the occasional revisionist moves, including the recent “conservative” turn under the Abe administration, might give rise to the suspect that Japan has not at all abandoned its geography.

Place, Space, and Politics: The Geopolitical Unity of Disunity

Space and political theory have moved into focus more than ever for students of international politics. However, it is not yet the case as far as Japan is concerned. A question which has recently come to the fore in the discipline of IR is whether there is non-Western theory or not (Inoguchi 2007; Shimizu et al. 2008; Acharya and Buzan 2007, 2017; Acharya 2014; Buzan 2016). This puzzle is in tandem with the concern about whether IR can ensure plurality in world politics (Buzan and Little 2001; see also a special issue of European Journal of International Relations 2013). In East Asia, while the debate on the Chinese School is lively (Zhao 2006; Callahan 2008; Lynch 2009; Qin 2016), that on Japanese School is mostly absent (Shimizu et al. 2008; Shimizu 2015; Watanabe and Rösch 2018), or rather it has interestingly narrowed down intra-regionally to the philosophy of the Kyoto School (Jones 2002; Ong 2004; Shimizu 2015). Accordingly, talking about the state as the subject of theory is avoided. One reason is probably that as Takashi Shogimen (2016: 337) aptly points out, “Euro-American intellectual framework (in translation) is now an alter (yet clearly dominant) ego for Japanese political thinking.” Another but clearly related reason is that, as evidenced in the aforementioned 1949 conference, talking about the space of the state from a theoretical perspective for Japanese scholars has become something to be sidestepped.

At least in Anglophone IR,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Standing in a Place, Imagining a Space
• 2. Contextualizing Traveling Theory
• 3. Inside the Place of Interpretation
• 4. Analytical Framework
• 5. Identifying the Site of Creation
• 6. The Importation of Geopolitics into Japan
• 7. Japanese Geopolitics
• 8. Conclusion: A Successful Journey?
• Back Matter