This book has the best of intentions. Most fundamentally, in Deconstructing Japan's Image of South Korea: Identity in Foreign Policy, Taku Tamaki urges theorists of international relations to take seriously the very real truth that socially constructed and lived perceptions of the “other”—in this case, Japan's perceptions of South Korea (and by extension Japanese perceptions of South Koreans)—affect how diplomats and politicians are able do their work, bottom-line “realist” interests notwithstanding. He urges, moreover, focus on identity as an analytical methodology to give agency to those involved in such activity, writing in the introduction that, “Only by taking into account a resilient identity through which an actor reflects on the various social contexts, we are able to salvage subjects from being reduced to automatons” (p.7).
Tamaki aims in this work to engage the field of international relations theory at a new level, meaning not the well-trod ground of historical, cultural, and social analysis in this field. He works hard, and admirably, to do so lest IR theory continue to “trivialize the contingencies of subjectivity, reducing identity down to mere difference” (p. 31). To counter and correct this feature of both constructivist and poststructuralist IR theory (as he rightly argues), Tamaki stresses in the opening chapters the significance of identity in general as a useful analytic construct. He then proceeds with his specific “case.” In Chapter 3 he examines several key contemporary Japanese identity narratives and in Chapter 4 the historical context of Japanese-(South) Korea relations. Part III, “The Narrative Tripod in Contemporary Japan-South Korea Relations,” by which he means “past,” “future,” and “backwardness,” analyzes the interplay with memory writ large.
Throughout, Tamaki offers apt details of Japan's political power in action, providing good evidence of how Japanese “policy elites are constantly consuming and remanufacturing, incorporating a convenient set of symbols that they can utilize to legitimize the nation's historical existence” (p.115). Here he makes the strongest statement in the book by demonstrating how “policy makers ‘make sense’ of Tokyo's policy options. In other words, the politics of memory provides us with an ideal platform from which we can observe the interaction between an agent and the structure” (p.115).
The recent publication date of this book (2010) depressingly illustrates the need, even at this late date, for IR as a discipline to engage identity at the conceptual level and to include Japan in the so-called international conversation. Tamaki's book, therefore, can be useful in allowing instructors to engage the “other” (understanding IR's “othering” of Japan as the “other” here, as well as well as the “other's” dealings with yet a further “other” (here, South Korea).
That said, and despite Professor Tamaki's commendable concern to explain Japan's postwar policy-making and culture, the book is a little difficult to follow on the larger plane of its question at hand: Japan and Korea. In other words, a deep structural problem lurks that indeed matters especially now and especially in the field of international relations: Japan's (and Japanese peoples’) identity-level understanding of Korea and Koreans transverses Korea's South/North national division. In short, many of the so-called history problems that infect and destabilize any so-called realist approach to Japanese-Korean relations stem from the era in the first half of the twentieth century when Korea was unified and a Japanese colony. That the moment of Korea's liberation from Japan in August 1945 came part and parcel with the moment of national division (at once conditioned by events originating both in the colonial era and America's national interests at the time and to this day, made defeated and occupied Japan complicit in the post-colonial national division. This perspective cannot be absent from any level of the discussion.
Tamaki acknowledges the need for a parallel study from the South Korean side to complement his book. Indeed, such a study would enrich the picture. Yet a more powerful move toward unraveling the events of the 20th century as a step toward a productive and peaceful policy in the 21st century, should begin with an analysis that untangles the many layers of “being Korean” in Japan, both within and beyond Japan's current borders. Doing so will allow the field of political science and its practitioners (the policy makers that Tamaki wishes to reach) to understand that Japanese identity involving Korea often subconsciously conflates all levels and categories of “being Korea”: north, south, resident, alien, pro-Pyongyang, Mindan, or simply the latest: “Ko-ri-an.”
