Grand strategy is all the rage in Tokyo these days. The Japanese political and military establishment senses a new world of possibilities now that it has shrugged off the more restrictive constraints of the “peace constitution” in order to support distant wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, participate in U.S. missile defense, and engage in peacekeeping missions. With so many new options available, Japan is on the verge of reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a fully engaged state with “normal”—that is, offensive—military capabilities.
Scholars of Japanese foreign policy are divided on whether these changes in security policy have been long in coming or are the result of a more recent and more abrupt shift in the domestic and geopolitical terrain. In his book Securing Japan, MIT's Richard J. Samuels makes a case for gradual evolution. He carefully traces the succession of compromises that brought Japan from the pacifism of the immediate post–World War II era to the more hard-edged realism of today.
Although he locates the origins of these compromises in the Japanese political turmoil of the early twentieth century, Samuels focuses on the tactical maneuvers of Japanese politicians such as Yoshida Shigeru, who served as prime minister for much of the first decade after World War II. It fell to Shigeru to mediate between those who offered a strict interpretation of Japan's peace constitution—and its war-renouncing Article 9—and those who still dreamed of achieving a global role for their country through alliance with the United States. As Samuels puts it, “Yoshida steered Japan brilliantly between Article 9 and the U.S. alliance, ‘squeezing it between’ (hasamiuchi) pacifism and traditional nationalism. He kept constitutional revision off the agenda and the Socialists out of power” (p. 35). Japan's Self-Defense Forces (SDF) were a supreme symbol of this compromise: defensive in name and yet considerable in size and firepower.
This pragmatic consensus prevailed during the Cold War period, Samuels argues, even as it was assailed from the right and the left. The pacifist wing won some key public battles (on suppressing military spending, restoring military exports, and advancing non-nuclear principles). But it would be the revisionists, still aspiring to great-power status, who so effectively employed “salami tactics” (p. 87) to alter the security consensus in their favor and prepare the ground for a more explicit move toward a “normal” security posture by the end of the twentieth century. The 1990s, Samuels argues, were by no means a “lost decade” when it came to security policy. “Senior defense officials may still claim demurely that Japan is in a ‘rudimentary phase’ of determining its grand strategy,” he writes, “but Prime Minister Obuchi Keizo long ago declared that the SDF had passed into a new phase, from an institution being built to one being used” (p. 86).
As Samuels relates, the revisionists applied their salami tactics in the 1980s when Japan began to integrate its maritime fleet into the larger U.S.–Japan alliance strategy, excluded defense technology exports to the United States from the overall arms export ban, and joined Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. After the end of the Cold War, the revisionists moved into high gear. They engineered the passage of the International Peace Cooperation Law, which facilitated Japan's participation in peacekeeping and increased Japan's role in joint military exercises with the United States. And they overcame Japan's reputation from the first Gulf War for paying and not playing by actively supporting U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
These shifts in Japanese policy have reordered the playing field. Pacifists are still present, but their influence has waned. Middle-power internationalists would prefer to maintain a more defensive defense posture and focus on shoring up Japan's mercantile power. Two types of revisionists have become considerably stronger. “Neoautonomists” have championed a stronger military role for Japan, but one independent of the United States, while “normal nation-alists” are pushing for a conventional military capability but within the context of the U.S. alliance (p. 124). The identification of a new set of threats, such as the rise of China, the advances in North Korea's nuclear program, Japan's relative economic decline, and the potential waning of U.S. interest in its East Asian alliances, has given the revisionists the means to overcome the traditional pacifism of the Japanese public and trump the largely economic concerns of the mercantile realists who are content with middle power internationalism.
Securing Japan is one of a number of recent books that attempt to chart Japan's new military and foreign policy trajectory. It succeeds admirably in its efforts to alert Japan watchers in the United States and interested policy makers to the more interesting honne beneath the official security discourse's platitudinous tatemae. The current global economic crisis coupled with the persistent political chaos in Tokyo has altered this discourse somewhat since Samuels published his book in 2007. If the opposition Democratic Party continues to improve its political position, its emphasis on soft power and global engagement will mean that middle-power internationalists will likely regain some of their status in Tokyo, and the normal nation-alists will fall back on the defensive. But regardless of the results of Japan's next elections or the trajectory of the Nikkei, grand strategists on both side of the Pacific will be grappling with the dilemmas and choices laid out in Securing Japan for some time to come.
