Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy

Russia as Japan's 'Other'

Alexander Bukh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781134058341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

This book is the first attempt to examine Japan's relations with Russia from the perspective of national identity; providing a new interpretation of Japan's perceptions of Russia and foreign policy.

Alexander Bukh focuses on the construction of the Japanese self using Russia as the other, examining the history of bilateral relations and comparisons between the Russian and Japanese national character. The first part of the book examines the formation of modern Japan's perceptions of Russia, focusing mainly on the Cold War years. The second part of the book examines how this identity construction has been reflected in Japan's economic, security and territorial dispute related policy towards post-Soviet Russia.

Providing not only a case study of the Japan-Russia relationship, but also engaging in a critical examination of existing International Relations frameworks for conceptualizing the relationship between national identity and foreign policy, the appeal of the book will not be limited to those interested in Japanese/Russian politics but will also be of interest to the broader body of students of International Relations.

1
Exploring Japan’s identity

The overall aim of this book is to examine the evolution of the meaning of the Soviet Union and Russia for Japan during the six decades that have passed since the end of World War II. This work further represents a sincere effort to overcome the “model testing” predicament of International Relations (IR) scholarship, in which a theoretical “monologue of instructions” (Kratochwil 2000: 75) precedes the empirical study, which, in turn, is devoted to arguing the usefulness or, alternatively, the fallacious nature, of the theoretical model in question. Theory-free inquiry is obviously impossible. The mere fact that this research focuses on Japan and Russia, and not, say, on relations between Japan’s Niigata Province and the Russian Maritime Province, in itself carries a number of crucial assumptions about the nature of international relations. Propelled by the desire to go beyond theoretical model testing, driven both by the general trend in IR scholarship as well as by the absence of a reflective account of Japan’s relations with Russia, I decided to incorporate the notion of identity into the project. As such, the need for a certain theoretical foundation that would guide but at the same time also limit this inquiry seemed obvious. This study, or my “archive” as some choose to define their ontological and epistemological premises, is located within the post-structural strand of what can be defined as the constructionist or constructivist school of International Relations. As a justification for compromising my initial ambition not to engage in theoretical model testing and to undertake certain self-imposed limitations, I can only state that the choice of this particular analytical framework was not made a priori of the actual empirical work, but only after conducting an extensive survey of primary and secondary sources on Japan’s relations with Russia. An outline of the analytical framework that underlines this case study will be provided in the following section. Importantly, I do not claim exclusive validity or objectivity for this approach. It is my belief, though, that the framework outlined below enables the work to overcome a number of important limitations visible in current scholarship on Japan’s identity and foreign policy, which will also be noted below.

1.1 Analytical framework

Constructivism and Japan’s identity

On the whole, post-World War II IR theory has paid little attention to domestic non-material factors such as national identity and culture. As R.B.J. Walker has put it, the study of international relations absorbed the “premises of professionalism and scientific method” which came to dominate American social science in the mid twentieth century, embracing such scientific paradigms as the notion of objective analysis and the dichotomous separation of facts from values (Walker 1984: 191).¹ Theory has become increasingly structuralist and, as such, has drifted toward largely unvarying systemic properties of the “international” from which to deduce what were assumed to be uniform national interests of state actors. Kenneth Waltz’s seminal work, Theory of International Politics, written in 1979, became the symbol of this tradition, which assumes states to be rational unitary actors, pursuing accumulation of power, whose actions are governed by the underlying structure of international anarchy.

This said, the concept of national identity, which negates the presumed uniformity of nation-states, is not a new phenomenon in the broadly defined study of international relations. This concept, as well as other non-”rational choice” factors, was present in the scholarship in the 1940s and 1960s, and was used by such highly regarded academics such as Hedley Bull, Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas (Clunan 2000: 91). Also, contestations, or rather, modifications of the rationalistic perception of foreign policy, long predated any contestations of the basic paradigms of the utilitarian framework, with a number of scholars arguing for a variety of national role conceptions or emphasizing the importance of individual perceptions, values and attitudes in foreign policy making (for example, Holsti 1970, Hermann 1977 and Wish 1980). Analysis of the cultural factor in foreign policy formation had also begun long before the end of the Cold War, but has modestly focused on studies of particular cultures (for example, Watanabe 1978).

However, the most significant challenge to the hegemony of rational structuralism or “economic mode of analysis” (Katzenstein 1996: 15) emerged with the advent of the constructivist school of International Relations in the late 1980s, when the first constructivist theoretical work, World of Our Making by Nicholas Onuf (1989), was published. The main tenets of constructivism were later popularized in the writings of Alexander Wendt (1992 and 1999) and constructivism came to be perceived as the most formidable theoretical challenge to the rational choice orthodoxy. One key reason for the advent of constructivism was the drastic developments in the international arena that took place in late 1980s through 1990s. Theory, particularly problem-solving theory, which aims to provide a general framework for solving puzzles in relations among the nations, cannot exist in a vacuum, detached from the actual dynamics of the world, as its validity depends on its utility and technical applicability in explaining world events (Devetak 1996: 150). The end of the Cold War, which meant the end of ideological confrontation between communism and capitalism, as well as the dramatic developments in the international arena (such as for example, the war in former Yugoslavia) that followed, posed significant challenges to the dominance of rational choice, as these events simply could not be explained by the established analytical approaches (Katzenstein 1996a: 3–17). As such, the failure of mainstream IR theory to provide correct predictions and to explain outcomes caused many scholars and policy makers to re-engage with the national, i.e., with the domestic and the non-material sources of foreign policy. In the words of Lapid and Kratochwil, “the global eruption of separatist nationalism set in motion by the abrupt ending of the Cold War has directly and inescapably forced the IR scholarly community to rethink the theoretical status of culture and identity in world affairs” (1996: 4). An important part of the process was to reconsider the relevance of national characteristics to states’ foreign policy. At the same time, the conceptions of identity and culture have themselves gone through drastic revisions. These notions, which were perceived as singular, self-evident and non-problematic, have been subjected to extensive theorizing and the motifs of multiplicity and social construction came to dominate the debate of identity and culture. As such, the conception of identities has become “emergent and constructed, contested and polymorphic, and interactive and process-like” (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996: 6–8).

As opposed to the rationalist ontology of mainstream IR, constructivism/ constructionism, or what has been labeled as the “sociological turn” in IR (Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998: 675), denies the existence of an objective given reality, within which states operate, but perceives this as socially objectivated knowledge. This is probably the only ontological premise that unites the array of constructivist approaches and it remains rather difficult to provide a comprehensive identification of the claims of constructivism as a unified school (Zehfuss 2002: 2–3). Rather than a consistent theoretical framework, constructivism is probably better understood as a broad theoretical umbrella, which embraces a wide range of at times complementary but more often contradictory ontological and epistemological paradigms about the nature of international relations, the place of identities, ideas and culture in world politics (see for example, Onuf 1989, Kratochwil 1989, Wendt 1992, Lapid and Kratochwil (eds) 1996, Katzenstein (ed.) 1996a, Neumann 1998, Weldes et al. 1999, Wendt 1999, Guzzini and Leander (eds) 2006 and Zehfuss 2002).

Theoretical debates are vigorous and the occasional usage of terminology borrowed from the military lexicon (for example, see Campbell [1992] 1998: 207–27) underscores the depth of the theoretical rifts among the followers of rival approaches. The “thin” constructivists, who continue to adhere to positivism and structuralism, perceive identity and culture as another variable that should be incorporated into causal analysis, and conceive their framework as a middle way between post-structuralism and rational choice (for example, Adler 1997). They often view the more radical post-structural theorists, who abandon positivism in favor of discourse analysis and deny the validity of the “ideas/material forces” dichotomy (Doty 2000: 138), as followers of an exotic “Parisian” social theory and dismiss their arguments as being based on excessive attention paid to language, esoteric terminology and unscientific methodology (Jepperson, Wendt and Katzenstein 1996: 34 and Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998: 678). On the other hand, the post-structural constructionists accuse the “thin” constructivists with complete misunderstanding and misrepresentation of post-structuralist epistemology and its main tenets, such as “discourse,” “identity” and “culture.” As a result, they argue, the attempted “domestication” of this epistemology for the needs of mainstream IR scholarship by the “thin” constructivists leads to nothing more than theoretical shallowness and inconsistency (for example, Campbell [1992] 1998: 216–22, Doty 2000 and Zehfuss 2002).

While the importance of these debates should not be underestimated, it is far beyond the scope of this chapter to engage in an extensive theoretical argumentation regarding the appropriateness of one theoretical framework over another. As already noted, the analytical framework that guides this study is informed by the post-structuralist strand of constructivism and is closer to discourse analysis than to the conception of culture as an intelligible variable, which can be operationalized as a separate causal factor affecting the preferences of policy makers (Campbell [1992] 1998: 217–18).² However, instead of simply stating the main premises of this framework, I would like to highlight the possibilities that it holds through a brief engagement with existing constructivist scholarship on Japan. For this purpose the concise review of IR constructivism conducted by Bahar Rumelili (2004), which highlights the main ontological differences between the two strands, seems to be particularly useful.³

In brief, Rumelili argues that the two schools of IR constructivism, which she refers to as liberal constructivism (roughly corresponding to the notion of “thin” constructivism used above) and critical or post-structural constructivism, diverge on one rather fundamental ontological premise: namely, the role of “difference” in the constitution of identity (for a slightly different categorization of constructivist scholarship see Katzenstein, Keohane and Krasner 1998: 675–8). Liberal constructivism, which draws mainly from the sociological perspective of symbolic interactionism (for example, Berger and Luckmann[1966] 1980) focuses on social structures, either domestic or international, which, it is argued, are constituted by norms, ideas and collective meanings; it thus seeks to analyze a particular set of policies in terms of the socially constructed identity of the states. Critical constructivism, on the other hand, not only tends to avoid positivist analysis but, influenced by post-structural theory, negates the existence of objective social structures and focuses on notions of difference between the outside and inside of a certain group as central in the construction of meanings and identities (Rumelili 2004: 30–6).

Arguably, the majority of current IR scholarship that engages the notion of Japan’s identity belongs to the liberal constructivist school and is mainly focused on Japan’s security policy and its sources. In general, it has been driven by one research question: namely, why Japan has been reluctant to use military force since the end of the Pacific War (Katzenstein 1996: 1 and Berger 1998: 193). While exhibiting certain variations in approaches employed to answer this puzzle, the constructivists argued that post-war Japan has developed a uniquely antimilitarist identity of purely domestic origin, which constituted or constrained the national security agenda (Katzenstein and Okawara 1993, Katzenstein 1996 and Berger 1996 and 1998). Berger describes this antimilitarist identity as a domestically developed political culture of antimilitarism, while for Katzenstein it is a combination of a number of institutionalized norms, which have shaped or constituted⁴ the policy makers’ perceptions of international environment and national interests. In other words, Japan’s identity is conceived as a domestically developed social structure, which has existed independently of Japan’s policy but has continuously shaped it. For Berger, it is mainly the “strong antimilitarist sentiments” that emerged domestically in the wake of the World War II defeat (1998: x). Katzenstein, whose analytical framework differs from Berger’s in that it focuses on institutionalized norms as opposed to political culture, nevertheless argues, in a similar fashion, that in the post-war period Japan has embraced an identity of a “merchant nation” or “economic identity,” as opposed to its pre-1945 militarism (1996: 20). Japan’s external security, argues Katzenstein, is largely shaped by the normative context, which is defined by the interaction between the institutionalized social norms expressed by public opinion (1996: 39) and the legal norms (1996: 18) which “condition the definition of interests that inform Japan’s security policy” (1993: 129). These norms, it is argued, have become institutionalized in the media, in the judicial system and in the bureaucracy, and they shape the interests and policy choices of the government (1996: 19). Besides the emphasis on economic strength and the public support for Article Nine of the Constitution, Katzenstein’s analysis emphasizes the norms of peaceful diplomacy, low-key consensus approach in the political decision-making process, the lack of popular respect for the Self Defense Forces (SDF) and the reluctance of the public to support resort to military action. These, along with the legal norms embedded in the Constitution, are seen as constituting a stable normative structure of antimilitarism, which, since the end of World War II, has shaped Japan’s security policy (1996: 116–18).

This scholarship, claiming to challenge both the universal applicability of rational choice tools of analysis as well as the emphasis on Japan’s particularism in analyzing Japan’s foreign policy (Katzenstein 1996: 11–14), became one of the cornerstones of empirical constructivist scholarship and, arguably, came to define IR scholarship on Japan’s identity. While in recent years Katzenstein and Berger have abandoned their strict adherence to constructivism in favor of analytical eclecticism, the notion of Japan’s antimilitarism continues to serve as an important point of reference in their own and other Japan-related IR scholarship (for example, Katzenstein and Okawara 2004, Izumikawa 2005, Togo 2005, Nishi 2006 and Miyashita 2007).

I would argue that there are a number of important reservations that limit the usefulness of applying the militarist/antimilitarist dichotomy to the study of Japan’s identity. First, the ontological and epistemological foundations of the argument about Japan’s antimilitarist identity implies the existence of its opposite, namely, a particular militarist identity of pre-1945 Japan (what Berger calls “the prewar cult of Bushido and the Japanese warrior spirit” [1998: 199]) which, following the ontological dichotomy between identity and policy, existed as an independent variable that constituted or shaped Imperial Japan’s foreign policy. However, this kind of argument would be a grave simplification of pre-1945 Japan’s cultural or normative structures. Even the deeply Orientalist account of Japanese national character provided by Ruth Benedict concedes that in pre-1945 Japan, Bushido was a “modern official term which has no deep folk-feeling behind it” (1946: 175). But there is an even more fundamental problem with conceptions of Japanese militarism as a normative or cultural structure. For this either assumes a structural rupture between Japan’s pre-1931 colonialism on the one side and militarist Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s on the other or, alternatively, does not distinguish between the two periods in terms of the ideational structures that informed the policy. Either of these approaches is highly problematic...

Table of contents

• Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies / Routledge Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Exploring Japan’s identity
• 2 Constructions of Japan’s “self”
• 3 Japan’s “Soviet Union,” Japan’s “Russia”
• 4 Ainu, Russia and Japan’s quest for “Northern Territories”
• 5 Shiba’s original forms of Japan and Russia
• 6 “Newly born Russia” and Japan
• 7 The idea of the Northern Territories
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index