Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan

Ulv Hanssen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429823817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Through a discourse analysis of Japanese parliamentary debates, this book explores how different understandings of Japan's history have led to sharply divergent security policies in the postwar period, whilst providing an explanation for the much-debated security policy changes under Abe Shinz?.

Analyzing the ways identities can be constructed through 'temporal othering, ' as well as 'spatial othering, ' this book examines the rise of a new form of identity in Japan since the end of the Cold War, one that is differentiated not from prewar and wartime Japan, but from postwar Japan. The champions of this identity, it argues, see the postwar past as a shameful period, characterized by self-imposed military restrictions, and thus the relentless chipping away of these limitations in recent years is indicative of how dominant this identity has become. Exploring how these military restrictions have shifted from being a symbol of pride to a symbol of shame, this book demonstrates the concrete ways in which the past can both enable and constrain policy.

Temporal Identities and Security Policy in Postwar Japan will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese politics and foreign policy, as well as international relations more generally.

1 Introduction and theory

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to the debates surrounding Japanese identity construction in the postwar period and to discourse theory—the theory used to conduct the analysis in the subsequent chapters. The chapter reviews the existing constructivist scholarship on Japanese identity construction, which has focused either on postwar norms of antimilitarism rooted in Japan’s defeat in World War II or on specific Self/Other relations between Japan and other countries. The book is novel in that it combines the norm constructivists’ focus on the wartime experience with the relational constructivists’ emphasis on relationality. As a result, it identifies the phenomenon known as temporal othering, which refers to the construction of a peaceful postwar identity that is differentiated not from other unpeaceful countries, but from Japan’s own unpeaceful past. The chapter outlines how the concept of temporal othering can explain the fierce struggles over identity in postwar Japan and how these struggles can be identified and analyzed in a discourse analytical framework. A final section previews the structure of the book.

Postwar Japan: Exceptional or abnormal?

The central topic of this book is Japanese identity construction in the postwar period. There are many locales in which to study the emergence and unfolding of identity, but the field of national security and defense is arguably particularly relevant. This is partly due to the fact that security planners and opinion formers face a constant need to discursively reproduce a national Self among Others and to determine which Others constitute potential threats to the Self. National defense as an institution simply does not make sense unless there is an outside from which to defend the inside. David Campbell has made a similar argument with regard to foreign policy, remarking that foreign policy is a ‘boundary-producing practice’ that is ‘dependent upon discourses of fear and danger’ (Campbell 1992: 75, 85). I believe this to be even more the case in the debates about national security, which, of necessity, structure the world into an ordered inside and a threatening outside. Furthermore, national security is an important site for the study of identity simply due to the dramatic consequences that the drawing up of an inside and an outside can have for the people who are deemed to belong to either of these different spheres. In the event of war, being part of the inside rather than the outside can, and often does, become a matter of life and death. It is therefore impossible to talk about national security without at the same time making claims about whose security is to be ensured against which security threats. National security requires a constant production and reproduction of identity, boundaries, and threats.

The essentialist idea that our identities are permanently fixed to race, gender, or other physical attributes has been almost entirely discredited in academic circles. Rather, there is a widespread consensus that identity is dependent on its bearer’s cultural and discursive environment. As cultures and discourses change, so do the identities that they underpin. Due to its inherent malleability, any identity needs to be constantly reproduced in order to sustain itself. An identity is usually reproduced by the bearer engaging in practices that are believed to be compatible with that identity. At the collective level, this means that everybody who shares an identity has to be cognizant of which practices are intersubjectively deemed compatible or incompatible with the common identity. Given that identity is unfixed and to a considerable extent open to interpretation, there will be instances when people clash over the compatibility of identity and practice. When, in 2015, tens of thousands of Japanese gathered around the Diet building (the Japanese parliament) and countless other places to protest against the government’s decision to break the longstanding ban on collective self-defense, this was more than anything else a reaction against the implementation of a practice that was seen by a large segment of the population as incompatible with Japan’s identity as a ‘peace state.’ It demonstrated that, despite three decades of identity entrepreneurship by internationalists inside and outside of government, the antimilitaristic ideas forged in the experience of Japan’s defeat in World War II retained considerable constraining effects on Japanese security policy. The protests took many Japan watchers by surprise because they showed that the much-discussed ‘normalization’ of Japanese attitudes to security policy had not gone as far these observers had thought or, indeed, hoped. A significant proportion of the Japanese still opposed the idea that Japan’s military should be able to do the same things as the militaries of other countries. They were still arguing that Japan’s military—euphemistically called the Self-Defense Forces (SDF)—should be subjected to special constraints. For example, with regard to Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s security changes, Maeda Tetsuo (2018: 89), a long-time security analyst with pacifist leanings, recently lamented that the SDF had become ‘no different from a “normal army.” ’ This of course implies that the SDF should be different from a normal army.

This Japanese antipathy to playing a larger military role despite having the material capacity to do so has puzzled Japan observers since the late 1960s. For a solid part of the Cold War and beyond, Japan has been one of the largest economies in the world. International relations (IR) theorists and general observers of Japan’s exceptional economic rise in the 1960s were convinced that the remilitarization of Japan was just around the corner. It was simply taken for granted that its economic power would eventually translate into military power. Nonetheless, Japanese remilitarization remained elusive. Rather than reigniting aspirations of military greatness, Japan’s leaders, seemingly unmoved by communist threat perceptions, talked about excelling in peace by limiting military capabilities. Undoubtedly, Japan’s stance was not exactly pacifist during the Cold War. Japan established military armed forces in 1950 and a military alliance with the USA in 1951. Contrary to most people’s expectations, however, the more Japan’s economic power increased, the more intent it seemed to be on imposing stringent constraints on its military power. In 1967 it announced its so-called three non-nuclear principles, which banned the manufacture, possession, and introduction on Japanese soil of nuclear weapons. In 1976 it banned all arms exports and pegged its military spending to an arbitrary upper limit of 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). In addition, Japan has never amended its so-called peace constitution of 1947, which imposes strict limitations on the role of Japan’s military. (In fact, a literal interpretation of the constitution would make the Japanese military unconstitutional.) Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the discrepancy between Japan’s economic and military power is the apparent pride with which Japanese leaders have enforced it. During the Cold War, successive Japanese prime ministers characterized Japan’s abstention from military power as something that set it apart from other economic great powers and thus something that made Japan unique and exceptional. An oft-heard self-characterization of Japan in the 1970s was that of a ‘historic experiment.’ In other words, Japan’s accumulation of economic power without the corresponding military power made it different from all the economic great powers that had gone before, including Imperial Japan of the prewar era. Whereas the oligarchs of the Meiji period (1868–1912) had sought to catch up with the West through the creation of a ‘rich nation and strong military’ [fukoku kyōhei], the postwar leaders seemed to follow a different motto that retained the Meiji slogan’s first component but abandoned the last: a rich nation and a weak military. After the disastrous defeat in 1945 the new national narrative put economic growth front and center. In this narrative, restraining one’s military power was seen as a commonsensical policy choice for two reasons. First, military power was expensive and therefore portrayed as an impediment to the goal of economic growth. Second, restraining one’s military power demonstrated that ‘new’ Japan was different not only from the stigmatized ‘old’ Japan, but also from the other states in the international system. Abstention from military power allowed Japan’s leaders to paint a picture of Japan as exceptional and thus functioned as a foundation on which to construct a postwar peace identity.

Where the Japanese saw exceptionalism, however, Western academics and pundits mostly saw abnormality. Many were influenced by realist International Relations theories, into which postwar Japan visibly did not fit. If, as Hans J. Morgenthau (1948: 14) proclaimed, armed strength was ‘the most important material factor for the political power of a nation,’ and the struggle for power was ‘universal in time and space’ (ibid.: 16–17), then it followed that abstaining from ‘armed strength’ could only be abnormal and anomalous. Indeed, since the 1970s the characterization of Japan as an anomaly has been something of a red thread in the literature on Japan’s security policy. John M. Maki encapsulated Japan’s abnormality in a 1973 article in Pacific Affairs, writing that: ‘Put in the simplest possible terms Japan is an economic giant and a military pygmy’ (Maki 1973: 290). Japan’s apparent lack of interest in military power, he continued, was ‘a clear anomaly in a system of world politics where the prime determinant of role and influence during all the modern age has been the possession of military power and the will to use it’ (ibid.). Despite Japan’s careful steps toward remilitarization in the 1980s (Hook 1988), it was still considered an anomaly. George R. Packard (1986/7: 37) unambiguously stated that ‘[t]he position of Japan in the world is anomalous, if not historically unprecedented.’ Again, what made Japan’s position so ‘anomalous’ was its lack of military power despite the economic capacity to pursue it: ‘One must search hard […] to find a precedent for a nation that can afford the most modern weapons, yet makes the political decision to foreswear them, remaining a junior partner in an unequal alliance’ (ibid.). Kenneth N. Waltz (1993: 66) pointed out that ‘[c]ountries with great-power economies have become great powers, whether or not reluctantly.’ Japan’s deviation from this trajectory, he claimed, could only be described as a ‘structural anomaly’ (ibid.). For most realists, Japan has represented a structural anomaly because it ‘contradict[s] a large body of literature that suggests that great powers inevitably seek to develop military capabilities commensurate with their economic strength and overall political status in the international community’ (Berger 1998: 1; cf. Hughes 2016: 111; Oros 2017: 36). The anomaly and abnormal stigmas thus followed Japan far into the 1990s, and perhaps to a slightly lesser extent they are still firmly attached today. As Ilai Z. Saltzman (2015: 520) notes, the persistence of Japan’s low-key security policy even after the end of the stable Cold War system and despite the emergence of new potential threats, is an ‘anomaly’ that has ‘posed a major a major puzzle for IR theories.’ In the post-Cold War period, however, the characterization of Japan’s low-key approach to security policy as ‘abnormal’ has increasingly been appropriated by the Japanese themselves. Ever since Ozawa Ichirō (1994) famously called on Japan to become a ‘normal country’ in the early 1990s, postwar Japan’s inclination to deliberately avoid playing up to its military potential has ceased to be viewed as something to be proud of, and instead come to be regarded as something shameful. The promise of ‘normalization’ has implicitly been at the core of the Japanese government’s gradual but relentless efforts to reverse the self-imposed security restrictions of the past. As Chapters 5–9 show, this revolt against the past has been so thorough that there is today hardly anything left of the security policy constraints that Japan’s leaders once used to boast about and evoke as evidence of Japan’s uniquely peaceful character. The realist discourse of normality has not just been accepted in Japan—it has come to dominate to such an extent that opposing it can lead to political and social ostracization.

This book is an attempt to make sense of how the Japanese could go from regarding security policy restraint as a unique virtue to regarding it as an abnormal vice. Thus, it adds to the extensive constructivist literature on the link between Japanese identity and security policy. The sections below review the major arguments in the literature and outline how the book contributes to this literature.

Norm constructivism

In the early 1990s Thomas U. Berger, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Okawara Nobuo Okawara planted the seeds of what would develop into a new school of thought that challenged the realist hegemony in Japanese security studies. Their basic premise—that the reality on which humans act is a social construct rather than a reflection of events and objects in the world—meant these scholars would later be identified as constructivists. It is mainly the constructivist literature that this book seeks to ‘speak to’ in the following pages. These early constructivists sought to challenge the dominant realist theories in which a nation’s security policy could quite straightforwardly be explained with reference to power distribution and interest maximization. The constructivists argued that these power- and interest-based variables were an insufficient explanation of Japan’s minimalist security policy in the postwar period, which had in fact troubled realists for decades. Missing from the equation, they argued, was a focus on more culturally oriented factors such as the ‘culture of antimilitarism’ (Berger 1993, 1998) and ‘pacifist social norms’ (Katzenstein and Okawara 1993; Katzenstein 1996). These scholars argued that the reason why Japan had not remilitarized to the extent that realists expected was that Japanese society was imbued with a culture that held the military in contempt and with norms that constrained the development of a more muscular security policy. In other words, Japan had learned lessons from the disastrous militarist adventure that led up to the events of 1945. Antimilitaristic culture and norms, they claimed, trumped structural pressures to remilitarize, such as the external threat environment. These scholars argued not only that normative constraints had limited Japanese security policy in the past, but also that they would continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The pioneering articles by Berger, Katzenstein, and Okawara set in motion a storm of constructivist works focused on the enabling and constraining effects of norms in Japanese society. Due to their strong focus on intersubjective norms, Linus Hagström and Karl Gustafsson (2015) have labeled them ‘norm constructivists.’ These norm constructivists invoked norms in their explanations of Japanese policy on whaling (Hirata 2008), participation in UN peacekeeping operations (Dobson 2003), foreign aid (Sato and Asano 2008; Tarte 2008), and Japanese security (Hook 1996; Oros 2008, 2015, 2017; Sato 2008; Izumikawa 2010; Singh 2013; Akimoto 2018).

Norm constructivists typically define norms as a ‘standard of appropriate behavior for actors with a given identity’ (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998: 891). This means that these constructivists consider norms to spring from identity, as appropriateness can only find a concrete expression through the cognitive lenses of the actors involved. In this normative model, the actors’ behavior is shaped by intersubjective norms and logics of appropriateness, which in turn are shaped by actors’ identities, that is their understandings about who they are. Norm constructivists therefore tend to see identity as an independent variable that causes behavior (the dependent variable) through the creation of norms (Hagström and Gustafsson 2015: 4). Although Berger, Katzenstein, and Okawara did not strictly talk about identity in their first norm constructivist articles, their focus on an ‘anti-militarist public climate’ (Katzenstein and Okawara 1993: 87) and a ‘culture of anti-militarism’ (Berger 1993) implies the existence of a commonly shared antimilitarist identity in postwar Japan. The turn to ideational factors such as identity, norms, and culture was significant because it expanded the analysis of state action by going beyond the predetermined interests assumed in realist theories. As Ted Hopf (1998: 175) notes, ‘neorealism assumes that all units in global politics have only one meaningful identity, that of self-interested states.’ Thus, everything that does not seem to conform to a realist understanding of interest, power maximization, and security is necessarily dismissed as an anomaly. By not taking the identity question as a given, constructivism opened up the possibility of a potentially infinite number of motivations for state action. For Japan in particular, this analytical expansion was significant because it had the potential to do away with the ‘abnormal’ and ‘anomaly’ stigmas that had stuck to Japan for decades. If postwar Japan was permeated by an identity and culture that could be termed ‘antimilitarist,’ and if these ideational factors trumped material and structural ones, then abstention from military power was not abnormal. On the contrary, it was the most normal policy line that Japan could have adopted.

What according to norm constructivism accounts for the antimilitarist sentiment in Japan? Regardless of whether the focus is on antimilitarist identity, norms, or culture—and these terms often seem to have almost interchangeable meanings—all norm constructivists agree that antimilitarism is a purel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Series editor’s preface
• Preface and acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction and theory
• 2 Two competing security discourses, 1945–1960
• 3 Hypothetical enemies, 1960–1970
• 4 The historic experiment: Refusing to become a great military power, 1970–1980
• 5 The emergence of the normal nation discourse, 1980–1990
• 6 Discursive rise and fall, 1990–2000
• 7 Japan as a responsible member of the international community, 2000–2010
• 8 Breaking out of the postwar regime, 2010–2019
• 9 Conclusion
• Index