Paul Midford's book rightly claims to be the first single-authored work on the influence of public opinion on Japanese foreign and security policy for fifty years, the last being Douglas H Mendel's 1961 study: The Japanese People and Foreign Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press). In taking up a topic that has remained dormant since Mendel's passing in 1978, Midford's study reignites scholarly interest in an under examined area of Japanese politics and foreign policy: the influence of the Japanese people.
Across nine chapters Midford attempts to “demonstrate that Japanese public opinion matters because it has a significant influence on Japanese foreign and security policies” (p. 7). Midford argues that the Japanese public never fully embraced the “pacifism” attributed to it by many authors, and that, despite having a high level of antimilitarist distrust, “never embraced unarmed neutrality” (p. 173). Midford instead claims that a more fitting encapsulation of the current position of the Japanese public is that of “defensive realism,” that is, i.e. the belief in the utility of defensive military power as an effective contribution to Japan's military security.
The book also claims that, through demonstrating that the Self Defense Forces (SDF) were not a threat to democracy and could be used responsibly, Japanese elites have been somewhat successful in eroding the antimilitarist norm widely held in Japanese society (p. 174). However, despite this small measure of success Midford rejects what he terms as the elitist view of many authors by arguing that although the elite have had some influence, they never actually fully controlled postwar Japanese public opinion. Midford instead argues that Japanese public opinion is independent, stable and coherent and has evolved in intelligible and generally rational ways over time. Midford states that this independent body of public opinion also actually constrains and molds the policy options of the Japanese elite (p. 3). In Midford's view public opinion in Japan, rather than being passively led by the Japanese elite, directly interacts to the “material reality of the international state system” (p. 177). Midford alleges that Japanese public opinion, through this awareness of international politics, has perceived a decline in the utility of strategic offensive operations from the Korean War onwards and has also developed a fear of entrapment by, and mistrust of, the United States. Midford builds on this analysis by stating his belief that this level of public awareness of the international state system and the residual influence of the antimilitarist norm will continue to prevent the deployment to the SDF in combat roles for many years to come (p. 189).
Midford's work is admirable and his arguments are convincing, but the book does suffer from a small number of weaknesses. With regards to methodology Midford himself notes the limitations of relying on the rather limited pool of data available on the subject, stating that “relying on real-world policy-context media and only a few polls more directly focused at revealing underlying attitudes, necessarily limit the precision of some of the inferences that can be drawn from this study” (p. 172). The book also does not sufficiently account for the presence of factions within the Japanese government and their influence on public opinion and policy, with Japanese senior politicians and bureaucrats largely being portrayed as a unified “elite” whose position is almost always “hawkish.” Perhaps most significantly, Midford also rather underplays the role of the United States and its highly significant influence on Japanese security policy. Both the basic influence of U.S. pressure on public and elite opinion and the often highly skillful employment of both public opinion and U.S. pressure to counter each other by the Japanese elite are both somewhat underexamined in this work.
In spite of these minor limitations, the book is still a highly significant contribution to the field and addresses a long neglected and important topic. Through his analysis of the influence of public opinion, Midford successfully makes the case for adding a third element, public opinion, to our formula for understanding Japanese security policy. However, this work does not really examine in detail how public opinion reacts with both of the two more commonly examined elements of Japanese security policy: the position of the Japanese “elite,” and pressure from Washington.
As well as providing a springboard for further research into this under-reflected facet of Japanese foreign policy and politics, this book will also be of use to those who research and/or teach Japanese politics, U.S.-Japan relations, modern Japanese history and East Asian international relations.
