Normalizing Japan

Politics, Identity, and the Evolution of Security Practice

Andrew L. Oros

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780804778503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Sécurité nationale

Normalizing Japan seeks to answer the question of what future direction Japan's military policies are likely to take, by considering how policy has evolved since World War II, and what factors shaped this evolution. It argues that Japanese security policy has not changed as much in recent years as many believe, and that future change also will be highly constrained by Japan's long-standing "security identity, " the central principle guiding Japanese policy over the past half-century. Oros' analysis is based on detailed exploration of three cases of policy evolution—restrictions on arms exports, the military use of outer space, and cooperation with the United States on missile defense—which shed light on other cases of policy change, such as Japan's deployment of its military to Iraq and elsewhere and its recent creation of a Ministry of Defense. More broadly, the book refines how "ideational" factors interact with domestic politics and international changes to create policy change.

1

Security Identity and the Evolution of Security Practice

Explaining Policy Change

Explaining policy change has been a core task for policy makers and scholars alike, but a particular problem for advocates of structural theories such as those based on “culture” or “polarity” of a system. The then-dominant structural realist theories of international relations widely failed at anticipating the end of the Cold War, for example, and culturally deterministic wartime explanations for Japan's military aggression were hard-pressed to explain Japan's policy turn after defeat in the Second World War. Today, when change in states'foreign policies is broadly apparent, renewed attention to this question is necessary. Recent changes in Japanese security practices have alarmed many observers and called into question past explanations for Japanese security practice. In particular, there is widespread concern that Japan is on the verge of disengaging the “brakes” (hadome, in Japanese) that limited Japanese military activity in the past half century. What often is overlooked in contemporary discourse, however, are the many cases throughout the postwar period when Japanese security policy changed in response to shifting political inputs and changes in its international environment. Further consideration of such cases offers insight into the ways in which policy change in Japan today conforms to past practice and the extent to which it suggests a new direction. Before examining the specifics of policy change in Japan, however, it is useful to consider the broader question of how policy change has generally been conceptualized.

This chapter lays out, first, three factors that contribute to general policy change. It then seeks to develop how security identity can contribute to understanding this process. Next, this general discussion is brought back to the specific case of Japan, suggesting how broader theories of policy change can illuminate existing scholarship on policy change in Japan. Finally, a theory of policy change based on the conception of a security identity is offered and contrasted with other prominent and contending explanations for Japanese security practice.

Explaining Policy Change

Three factors—individually or in combination—explain policy shift and therefore must be considered in conjunction with an explanation rooted in security identity.¹ Each of these factors contributes to a general explanation for Japanese security policy evolution over time (see Table 2). First, ideas about the appropriate course of action may change, leading to policy change. For example, changing notions of race may lead to new policies regarding racial segregation. In the security realm, new ideas about the utility of particular strategies or military technologies may lead to policy change. In the most extreme cases, wholesale change in ideas about security may explain dramatic policy shift, such as when comparing the cases of prewar and postwar Japan. Chapter 2 of this volume demonstrates how such a shift occurred in early postwar Japan, while Chapter 3 shows the opposite—stability despite a changed domestic and international environment. Jeffrey Legro (2005) offers one conceptualization of why such ideas change, which is applied to the case of Japan below.

Second, the distribution of power within a political system may shift, resulting in policy change. In democracies, this most often happens with a change to the party in power, but it also may take place even under a single party's rule due to changes in support levels among different groups within a single party or coalition. In the case of Japan, the ascendancy or decline of particular factions within the long-ruling LDP can explain some degree of policy shift, as could the periods where the LDP majority was fundamentally challenged. This factor often is related to the first factor in that change in support for a particular party or group may be based on changes in ideas held by supporters: voters may vote a party or a candidate in or out based on ideas they advocate. In later chapters of this volume, policy evolution due to shifting political support is widely evident.

Third, the context or environment in which a policy is made may change, resulting in policy change. In the realm of security policy, a change in threat, threat perception, or system stability may lead to a policy response, even if there is no change in the previous two factors. This aspect of policy change forms the basis of structural realist theory and accounts for a high degree of security policy evolution in Japan in recent years due to an objectively changed level of threat as well as greater Japanese perception of this threat.

To what extent do each of these reasons for policy change explain evolving security practice in postwar Japan? Each of the three factors contributed to a dramatic change in Japanese security practice after defeat in the Second World War: (1) a thorough discrediting of military expansionist ideology; (2) a purging (for a time) of wartime politicians and bureaucratic leaders and release of political prisoners who enjoyed new political support; and (3) a new international environment that soon would be characterized by a bipolar Cold War. In the first years of the twenty-first century, it is the second and third factors that best explain the degree of change in Japanese security practices, while the first factor has served both to limit and to shape the nature of policy change. Although perception of threat clearly has increased among the Japanese public in recent years, ideas about the best way to ameliorate such threats—reliance on the United Nations and international cooperation highest among them—have not changed substantially.² By contrast, a changed international environment—beginning first with the collapse of the enemy state Japanese security strategy was built around, the Soviet Union—necessitated changes in Japanese security policy and practice, despite similar ideas held by most Japanese and the same political party dominating the political system. Thus, on the surface, an explanation for policy change rooted in changes in the international environment—international relations realist theory— would appear to be the best starting point for explaining the evolution of Japanese security practice. However, the cases examined in this volume illustrate clearly that reliance on this school of theory alone leads to inaccurate prediction and inadequate explanation of postwar Japanese security practice overall. Failure to consider Japan's long-standing security identity leads one to incorrect predictions regarding future policy direction and outcomes and, conversely, fails to provide an explanation for the striking stability of Japanese security policy over the past fifty years. A rigorous conceptualization and application of Japan's security identity is necessary to understand Japanese security practice and its evolution over time.

TABLE 2
Why Policies Change

---

1. Ideas about appropriate action change, perhaps even so far as an identity shift

2. Political power distribution or the party in power changes

3. The context or environment in which policy is made or to which it is targeted changes

---

Security Identities and Security Practice: Toward a General Framework

The nature of a state's security identity is critical not only to understanding postwar Japan, but to understanding the security posture and policies of most states. A quick scan of the major transformative events of the twentieth century quickly underscores how changed domestic circumstances, and a state's perception of these changes as institutionalized in a security identity, can have dramatic consequences for domestic security policies as well as the broader international system. The end of the Cold War, the rise of the United States after the Second World War, the rise of China on the international scene in recent decades, and the outlier status of Japan in the late twentieth century are all due primarily to factors linked to each state's self-perceived security identity in the context of domestic political change.³

One of the more popular theoretical literatures in the study of international politics at the end of the last century, hegemonic stability theory, ultimately had poor predictive power due to the lack of sufficient attention paid to such domestic factors, including specifically the nature of Japan's security identity: Japan did not, in fact, rise to challenge the United States for global hegemony, but rather cooperated with the United States in extending the latter's military “hegemony” into the Asian region and beyond. As Henry Nau (2002) notes, “domestic change is often the primary source of external power shifts” (p. 237). But such “domestic change” must be contextualized and understood by citizens through an understandable lens: a defined, reproduced, and institutionalized security identity. The process by which such a lens is formulated, institutionalized, and maintained over time is inherently political. The next section develops a framework by which these processes can be understood, setting the basis for the empirical work of the following chapters.

While ideas about specific policies within the broader identity may evolve on a regular basis, a change in the principles underpinning the basic direction of state policy is much less common and thus a more significant occurrence. Change in this area when applied to the security realm gets to the core of possible security identity shift and therefore deserves special attention here.

Explaining Identity Shift

Security identity—or other forms of state identity, as discussed below—therefore can be used to explain the evolution of policy practice in two distinct ways. First, in periods of “normal politics” the identity structures political action in line with the central tenets of this identity. This process, and the way by which it comes about, is discussed in the following sections of this chapter. Second, major policy change can take place through the adoption of a new security identity—an identity shift. While such shifts do not, by definition, occur frequently within states, across states they do occur frequently enough to allow general theory to be formulated about what factors contribute to identity shift, and to the important corollary question of how a new identity can become hegemonic.

Here Legro's work on state conceptions of the international system—an ideational variable similar in many ways to a security identity as postulated in this study—is instructive. Underlying wholesale identity shift, in Legro's view, is a disjuncture between what he calls “social expectations” resulting from “collective ideas about what should be expected to occur and what is desirable” (Legro 2005, p. 32) and what actually happens in the material world. Instances of substantial disjuncture in a negative way can precipitate identity shift. However, he argues, importantly, that it is insufficient to consider only the “collapse” of an identity, but that equally one must consider the likelihood of “consolidation” of a new identity. As he rightly notes, “Individuals may agree that the old view has to go but may not be able to agree or coordinate on what new orthodoxy should be the guide” (p. 15). This perceptive observation may be quite important to explaining the direction of contemporary Japanese security policy.

Legro studies one case of identity shift in Japan, in the late nineteenth century, which demonstrates how the collapse of the old identity of isolationism greatly preceded any new consensus about a new identity which could be consolidated. The following chapter of this volume shows a similar phenomenon in the case of immediate postwar Japan, where it took fifteen years for a new identity to begin to be consolidated, despite the thorough collapse of the old identity. The cases of immediate post–Cold War and contemporary Japan are less clear. Some argue that Japan today is in a process of ideational collapse. Critical to this question, therefore, are the alternative identities that can be consolidated. As Legro notes, a common limitation in this search—at least initially—is that “when serious problems arise, policymakers go looking for new ideas but have to choose from the existing supply, those notions developed in the preceding period” (p. 35). As discussed in later chapters of this volume, however, this is less the case in Japan today (where political entrepreneurs have had nearly twenty years to articulate new post–Cold War visions for Japan) than in the immediate post–Cold War period.

From a theoretical perspective, therefore, this conceptualization of identity shift does make the viability of adopting and consolidating a new security identity seem more likely in Japan today than a framework based solely on collapse. Still, the critical theoretical issue facing the case of contemporary Japan is what would precipitate a “collapse” of the old identity, in order for another contending set of principles to take root. The argument of later chapters of this volume is that there is nothing approaching the level of discontinuity necessary to precipitate such a collapse in Japan today. Moreover, Legro argues that new ideas must achieve “social salience”—that is, they must be “backed by important constituencies or activist subgroups . . . that have the ability to vie for new dominant orthodoxy” (p. 35) in order for principles to be consolidated into a new identity. What is important in this approach, as well as the approach advocated in this volume, is that the presence or absence of alternative ideas, and the social salience of these ideas, becomes central to theorizing the likelihood of identity shift—apart from realpolitik international and domestic political concerns. Simply put, identity shift cannot take place without the presence of an alternative set of unifying principles and respected political actors to advocate for them. Renewed attention to this area of discourse on foreign policy visions for Japan's future is therefore an important part of the research agenda, one usefully pursued by Richard Samuels (2007).

Conceptualizing Multiple and Competing Identities over Time

At one level, as Legro conceptualizes, state identity is a lens through which citizens determine a framework for a state's appropriate response to the demands and challenges of the international environment. Multiple such lenses are imaginable—activist or passive, internationalist or isolationist, revolutionary or status quo are several general postures often considered by states.⁴ Choosing just one identity is impossible for an individual (e.g., which is more important to you— your skin color or your religion?); even more so for a state. As with individuals, a state will not assume only one identity but will manage multiple, and at times possibly even conflicting, identities in the course of its choices and policy making. Rawi Abdelal et al. (2005), among others, usefully delineate measurement of identity into two parts—content of the identity and contestation over the identity, a framework employed in this volume as well. This latter category might be further expanded to consider contestation over overlapping or conflicting identities rather than over a single identity, such as a security identity, since our choices of identity in particular contexts affect our actions—both as individuals and as states.⁵ In the cases considered in this volume, for example, Japan's security identity of domestic antimilitarism frequently comes into conflict with Japanese elite views of Japan as a technonationalist or trading state.

State identity is, by definition, a collective identity, which requires a conceptualization and tools of analysis different from those used in an examination of individual identity. States institutionalize the identities they seek to reify and project them to others in laws and other norms of behavior. What identity will be institutionalized is a fundamentally political question—one which is simply understood in some rare states, never reached in unfortunate others, and the subject of continual battles and rearticulation in the majority of cases.

A security identity is a subset of the larger question of national identity, which pervades much of the recent literature on identity factors in international politics. It is not the position of this study that a security identity arises from a shared worldview among decision makers or the general public. Rather, a security identity may become hegemonic as a result of a political solution that reflects the individual beliefs of some political actors but also accommodates the interests of powerful political and economic actors who benefit materially from the identity in the short term yet do not necessarily embrace its ideological content.⁶ Moreover, the contestation element over the security identity may continue even after it has become hegemonic—a critical element of policy change discussed in subsequent chapters. Thus, a security identity cannot be defined by individual beliefs—whether present or absent—nor negated by the presence of opposition alone. The factors that lead to the adoption and codification of a security identity therefore demand special attention.

In postwar Japan, the security identity of domestic antimilitarism is not a “grand design” propagated by the politically or economically powerful, reflecting both their interests and worldview. Nor, as noted in the introduction, is it an ideology or a national culture. However, over time many actors who initially supported the emergent identity only for reasons based solely on material interest later supported the ideological component of the security identity more broadly once it was institutionalized. Herein lies an important “identity” component of the analysis offered here—it is not just a matter of logrolling, nor of institutionalization. Through the negotiation and adoption of a series of policies and precedents, an identity can be created that exerts a presence of its own.

To examine this process, it is useful to break discussion of the role of security identity on policy practice into temporal stages, as the subsequent case chapters of this volume are organized, following Kathryn Sikkink's approach to the study of the role of ideas in Latin American economic development policy. Sikkink (1991) implements a separation of the role of ideas analytically into three temporal stages—adoption, implementation, and consolidation. Ideas matter at each stage of the process, but in different ways. In a similar vein, it is useful methodologically to trace policy formulation on one issue over time—from initial debates through implementation and later consolidation and revision—to see how security identity affects the outcome. While the role of ideas and the impact of a security identity are not identical, it is useful methodologically to conceptualize their effects in a similar fashion. Such an approach also serves, methodologically, to maximize the number of observations from a smaller number of cases—an important factor in extending the theoretical breadth of a single study.

One must be careful not to take this logic too far to a point where competing elites support an appealing security identity only to propagate and legitimate their interests, but where the actual content of the identity plays no causal role. This way of thinking, as Judith Goldstein and R...