The security situation in East Asia has been tense during the last two decades. The media keep reporting about North Korea's continued development of nuclear weapons and test firing of various new missiles. The murder of Kim Jong-un's half-brother in Kuala Lumpur recently is just the latest bizarre report on how the leader is treating his family. We are fed news about increased tension between China and Japan and how South Korea and Japan never seem to be able to settle their historical accounts. In Japan, paragraph 9 of the Constitution has been reinterpreted so that the Self-Defense Forces can participate in collective defense. Prime Minister Abe is portrayed as a hawk and his country as becoming more militaristic. This seems like a scary situation, but the big question is how to interpret all this news. To help, luckily enough, we now have four new books by scholars who have spent several years consistently penetrating key issues concerning Japan's security policy and its relation with its closest neighbors, namely South Korea, North Korea, and China.

Let us start with the most thoroughly researched of them all: Amy Catalinac's Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan. This rigorously researched book uses a quantitative method, almost like that of the natural sciences, to solve the puzzle of a shift in behavior by conservative Japanese politicians. How did elected officials who acted for years as if they were uninterested in national security issues suddenly, in the space of a few months in 1997, change and instead become extremely interested in security issues? This cannot be explained by mainstream theories of international relations. A variable seemed to be missing here and, as this change preceded a major transformation in Japanese security policy, it is important to know which this variable was. If the puzzle is not solved it will also leave space for various interpretations—that Japanese politicians had become more hawkish and shifted to the ideological right; that the security situation in the area had deteriorated; and that antimilitarism had weakened.

Catalinac argues that the cause lies elsewhere: a change in the election system led politicians to shift their electoral strategies from “pork” to policy. In 1994, a non-Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) government came to power for the first time since 1955, and the year after it passed legislation to transfer the electoral system for the House of Representatives from the single non-transferable vote in multi-member electoral districts to a mixed-member majoritarian system. Under the old system, conservative politicians focused on intra-party rivalries rather than on broad policy issues like national security. Under the new system, intra-party competition was eliminated, which provided incentives to switch electoral strategies from pork for specific groups to policies for the nation.

To prove her point, Catalinac has analyzed 7,497 election manifestos by the candidates (senkyō kōhō in Japanese) from the last three elections under the old system as well as five elections under the new one. She has used quantitative text analyses, specifically topic modeling with latent Dirichlet allocation. This process estimated degrees of reliance on pork, policy, and security policy in the manifestos. In the following three chapters, Catalinac explores the results and finds that the conservatives prioritized pork before the reform but then switched to broader issues, and that the conservative electoral strategy comprised no national security strategy before the reform but included national security after the reform. She also notes that strategies for candidates from seventeen opposition parties were dominated by broad policy issues both before and after the change of the election system. Catalinac explores and dismisses several alternative hypotheses for the shift: the retirement of older candidates with memories of the war, voters’ demand for recalibration of security policy, concern about security brought about by threats by North Korea or China, other changes in the opportunity cost brought about by economic recession or increased coverage in the media, etc. However, there was an absence of evidence in all alternative hypotheses. This strengthened Catalinac's conclusion that it was the electoral reforms that brought about the change.

What are the broader implications of this research? There has been a debate between scholars of Japanese policy as to whether the reforms really changed the electoral strategies of conservative politicians. Case studies of campaigns fought under the new system have suggested “business as usual,” but Catalinac argues that while politicians’ use of institutions such as support organizations may be the same, the subject of the electoral competition, what they chose to talk about with their constituents, has changed. For scholars of international relations, one takeaway is that electoral systems influence security policy. Another is that democracies are not monolithic and the extent to which voters can hold their leaders accountable for security policy varies. A third is that security policy is influenced by politicians’ desire to keep their jobs. Under Japan's new electoral system, keeping your job has meant paying attention to national security.

Catalinac's research in Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan is path-breaking. It should make many scholars on Japanese security (including this reviewer herself) open their eyes wider and consider new reasons for increased attention to national security. Rather than changes in the security situation in East Asia, the shift seems to stem from something as mundane as politicians wanting to keep their jobs under a new electoral system.

Like Catalinac, Brad Glosserman and Scott Snyder explore how domestic issues influence security policy. In The Japan-South Korea Identity Clash, they examine the internal dynamics of the parallel US alliances: US-Japan and US-South Korea. In both cases, domestic policies in all three countries are producing frustration with the alliances in ways that did not occur during the Cold War. Some of these changes are the result of internal political transformations. South Korean public opinion has become more influential in foreign policymaking. Likewise in Japan, where opinion in Okinawa sometimes has superseded alliance management.

This study uses public opinion surveys and elite interviews and commentary to understand foreign policy. The theoretical framework used is one of identity. Recently this concept of identity has moved into the mainstream of international relations research. But how do we define the contours of a national identity? According to Glosserman and Snyder, there are several ways, such as the examination of the national literature expressive of a country's underlying values, the examination of historical narratives, and analyses of textbooks. They have chosen to focus on polling data analyses as the prime means for exploring national identity. The puzzle to be solved in this volume is the persisting tension in the Japan–South Korean relationship. This is of particular interest for US security specialists, as the United States is trying not only to strengthen its alliances with Japan and South Korea but also to support greater cooperation between the two to strengthen regional stability and to maintain a balance in the region as China's power is rising.

The chapter entitled “Japan's Identity Crises” starts off by describing the prolonged economic stagnation between 1991 and 2001 (known as “the lost decade”), the Lehman shock of 2008, and the fact that in 2010 China overtook Japan as the second-largest economy in the world. The Japanese beliefs in international law and that international organizations would be arbiters in international disputes were dealt blows by the North Korean nuclear crises and the failure of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty to deal with them, the Taiwan Strait crises, and the launching of the Taepodong missiles. At home, there were the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995, the sarin gas attack on Tokyo's subways, and then in 2011 the triple catastrophe at Fukushima. The economic stagnation and these incidents have affected the way the Japanese people see themselves. Few Japanese believe the country should play a regional role, Glosserman and Snyder claim, which contrasts with Catalinac's finding that all politicians now must have security issues in their election manifestos. Poll results are the tool used to analyze both Japanese values and relations with China and the United States. To explain Japan, the authors also cite Murakami Haruki's use of the word mujō, a Buddhist concept that means that everything is ephemeral and nothing is immutable or eternal, something that has been burned into the spirit of the Japanese people.

This is followed by a chapter entitled “South Korea's Growing Confidence,” which traces the identity formation process. Korean political factions have historically split between conservatives and progressives, who are considered pro-North Korea, and the inter-Korean summit in 2000 showed a deep conflict between the two groups. In contrast to most Japanese, most Koreans support an international role for their country, if that role promotes Asian economic development and serves as a bridge between East and West. Polls show great expectations of China as an economic partner, with over two-thirds of South Korean respondents in a survey agreeing to the statement that China will be their most important economic partner within a decade. In 2004, there was a decline in positive feeling towards the United States, but since then South Korean support for the alliance has rebounded again.

The following chapter gets into the Japan-South Korean relationship. The reason for using public opinion data is that this is a way of getting into the heads and minds of the public on both sides and understanding identity-related issues more deeply. I am not convinced that this is really achieved. We get Japanese and Korean views on each other, and there is a figure on relative trust between the two, but the public opinion polls are simple and cannot really be said to explain identity-related issues. Nor are the polls, which are taken from various sources in both countries, critically analyzed and put into any context.

Historically, US foreign policy in Asia has focused on bilateralism, but The Japan-South Korea Identity Clash ends with policy proposals for how to reinvigorate trilateralism, which is now encouraged by the US government. Several steps have been taken in that direction. Foreign ministers from the three countries have met on a regular basis, as have lower-level officials, and a trilateral steering group has been established. This is a promising development, but where the US alliances with both countries and their shared values and political systems are concerned more could have been expected. Despite historical tension, Japan, China, and South Korea successfully established a Trilateral Coordination Secretariat as early as 2010, an administrative mechanism that is still missing in the above trilateral relationship. Glosserman and Snyder suggest that Japan, the United States, and South Korea should go for a “Grand Bargain,” as “the upside is too great to settle for safe inaction” (pp. 171, 179). For that to happen, Japan and South Korea should come to terms and tackle shared problems to protect their national interests as well as those of the United States. What is not taken into consideration here are the two elephants in the room, China and North Korea, as well as the fact that countries need to coexist in a globalized world. Japan's relations with those two countries are the topics of the two other new books under review.

In Japanese Society and the Politics of the North Korean Threat, Seung Hyok Lee tackles the Japanese response to the North Korean threat. It is a case study of the two ballistic missile tests that North Korea conducted close to Japan in 1998 and 2006 and Japan's response. In 1998, Japan demonstrated its disapproval with a noncoercive condemnation, but in 2006 it responded by imposing unilateral economic sanctions. This was the first time since the Second World War that Japan applied substantial coercion to punish a neighboring country. The puzzle that the book seeks to solve is why Japan reacted so differently to two incidents that were basically very similar. Lee argues that the unilateral sanctions imposed in 2006 were not a strategic response to punish North Korea for the missile launch per se but instead were a consequence of a shift in the Japanese societal discourse on North Korea that took place during these years.

A historical background gives a picture of how Japan, in its postwar diplomatic interaction with the two Koreas, was reluctant to express security concerns, since any Japanese initiative alongside supporting the inter-Korean dialogue could be seen as interference in Korea's internal affairs. Besides the government, the general public was equally passive concerning Japan's role in a potential contingency situation. Reflecting the general trend, Japanese media throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s emphasized the need to maintain peace and friendship. After the end of the Cold War, the Japanese government tried to improve official relations with the North and trials to establish diplomatic relations were done. The Japanese general public was still neutral, but two incidents between 1998 and 2000 were to change that, although there was no transformation of Japanese security policy. They were the launch of the North Korean Taepodong-1 ballistic missile and the appearance of so-called fushinsen (mystery/spy ships) off the Japanese coast. Japan demanded that the UN Security Council pass a resolution condemning the Taepodong-1 launch. This never materialized, and only a press statement was issued. A second multilateral response was a temporary freeze of financing for a light water reactor in North Korea promised in connection with the Korean Energy Development Organization agreement. This freeze was lifted after only a few weeks. Other policy responses were Japanese participation in the US Theater Missile Defense initiative and Japan's launching of its own spy satellites.

In 2001, there was a second fushinsen incident, during which the Japan Coast Guard for the first time actually used deadly force, shooting at the ship and sinking it. The same year, Junichiro Koizumi became prime minister in Japan. He had a strategy of making friends with the media and always being available. (If we believe in Catalinac's research findings, this might actually have been a result of the election reforms because citizens’ interest in and understanding of politics increased.) The big watershed in the Japanese perception of North Korea came when Koizumi visited North Korea in 2002, the first Japanese prime minister to do so, and signed the Pyongyang declaration, a document aimed at improving relations. According to opinion polls right after this, Koizumi and the principles behind the declaration were given a high rating. But when Kim Jong-il admitted that his country had kidnapped Japanese citizens, the public was shocked and dissatisfied with how the two governments had collaborated on this issue. The revelations had a devastating effect on the implementation of the rest of the agreement, since Japanese-North Korean relations were overshadowed by the abduction issue.

Lee gives a detailed account of how the Japanese public perceived the abduction issue. A number of abduction issue–specific interest groups rose to the forefront of societal and media attention. Even ordinary people who had never been involved in politics or activism before rallied, as they were genuinely moved by the faith of the abductees and their families. Protesters criticized bureaucrats for not having taken action before and being too lenient. Politicians, including the LDP, were also criticized, but most hard hit were the Social Democratic Party and the communists. Media belonging to the progressive camp were excoriated for insufficient engagement for the sake of the abductees. Journalists were self-censoring and fastening onto the public's main trends.

With the hardening of opinion against North Korea, the Japanese government quickly responded to the changing atmosphere. Threat perceptions of North Korea led to more bureaucrats and politicians raising concerns over Japan's defense-oriented security policy. Politicians from all parties facing election in 2003 realized that a pro-North Korean stance had no future. Lee shows how unilateral sanctions on North Korea were prepared as early as 2004, when the DNA samples taken from the ashes provided by the DPRK for the youngest abductee, Yokota Megumi, could not be linked to her. When North Korea made the announcement that it had nuclear weapons in 2005, Japan could have imposed sanctions but preferred not to do so, as this issue was considered too “distant, abstract and arid” (p. 104).

According to Lee, contemporary analysts who focus on the nuclear issue as the driving force behind Japanese policymaking toward North Korea miss the point. The nuclear threat surely reinforced social anger over the abduction issue, but it was not the origin of or the driving force behind the hardening of policy. The sanctions were in the pipeline due to the abduction issue; the launch of Taepodong-2 in 2006 made the implementation of the sanctions timely and suitable. Although the “abduction fever” has cooled down somewhat, any long-term progress on relations with the North will not be feasible without Japanese societal consent, according to Lee. At present, when further missiles have been fired and reports of the murder of Kim Jong-un's half-brother in Kuala Lumpur have been reported, that consent is not likely to be given. Referring back to Glosserman and Snyder, it is interesting to note that while North Korea has also abducted many South Koreans, the abduction issue is much more heated in Japan.

This brings us to the last big elephant in the room, namely China. In Intimate Rivals, Sheila Smith puts great emphasis on domestic public opinion and domestic interest groups in the formation of Japanese policy. Her account shows that diplomacy alone is not enough to bridge the growing number of differences between the two neighbors, and this failure leads to frustration among the Japanese policymakers and the general public. Even if China is not held accountable for all the difficulties, it is a challenge for Japan to adjust to its growing power. The Japanese public has recently become sensitive to Chinese influences on their society, and there is growing tension that suggests a tendency towards confrontation. Accommodation rather than confrontation seems to have been the diplomatic choice hitherto. Recently, however, Japanese leaders have not been able to be too accommodating for mainly domestic reasons.

Relations between Japan and China are complex, and diverging interests pull in different directions on different issues. To capture as full a picture as possible, Smith has chosen to make four case studies of four issues of contention: Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to the Yasukuni shrine, the efforts to negotiate shared use of the East China Sea, the gyoza (dumpling) food poisoning incident, and the Senkaku territorial dispute. Each of these cases offers insight into how the Chinese influence on Japanese society is perceived and the various domestic actors shaping policymaking on China.

One of Smith's major conclusions is that Japanese voices in the debate on China have greatly diversified, with many groups and many different viewpoints. Another conclusion is that business has lost influence in this field and no longer has a common standpoint. Economics can no longer be separated from politics in Japan's relations with China, whether in the international relations field or on the domestic level. Instead, China policy has become part of a debate on the needs for governance reforms in Japan. In the wake of the gyoza food scandal, in which contaminated dumplings imported from China reached Japanese stores, the Japanese consumer movement's argument for a consumer protection agency gained strength. Policy differences with China led to cross-party cooperation on domestic policy reforms, as in the case of new ocean laws for implementing a new Japanese ocean policy.

Smith reports that Japan's general public has gradually lost confidence in the government's ability to negotiate successfully with China. That shift encouraged anti-Chinese activists, who had been marginal in public discourse, to find a broader audience. One example is the 2010 case of a Chinese fishing trawler entering Japanese waters, where groups agitating for Japanese claims to the Senkaku Islands managed to claim center stage in the national elections in 2012 and 2013. Smith found evidence that the activist groups supporting the Yasukuni shrine visits were not the same as those advocating for the Senkaku issue. The agenda of nationalists has so far not been uniform, nor cohesive or organized under a collective banner of anti-China nationalism. The variety of issues has so far not created a social movement capable of pressing the Japanese government into a unified position towards China. The government has so far preferred to negotiate incremental adjustments in policy rather than institute wholesale reforms. There has been a policy of adaptation to new conditions.

Generational change among politicians has also meant that many of the personal relationships old LDP politicians had with Chinese leaders are now gone. Smith concludes that Japan's response to China's rise can no longer be understood as simply a government exercise. Increasingly Japan's choices seem to be decided by societal pressure. Policymakers should be aware of how public skepticism has weakened support for any compromise with China.

This seems to be the general theme of all four of these books. Japanese international politics is changing, and this change is mainly driven by domestic politics. Politicians now have to listen and cater to public opinion in a way they did not in the past. This might be a sign that the Japanese people, who have lived in a democratic country since the end of the Second World War, have finally understood the power they have and have started to use their rights.

Is all well then? I do not think so. Something important is missing here, namely the need for Japanese politicians with a vision and the analytical capacity to make wise decisions on their own, to think for the long term and to be able to govern and not just follow the crowd. The abduction issue is the most obvious case. Understandably it was an emotional issue that touched the hearts of most Japanese, but did this anger and the total scrapping of the Pyongyang declaration lead to anything constructive? Has the North Korean threat eased in any way?

Japanese politicians’ response was utterly populistic. Unfortunately Japan is not the only country in the world where politics is being driven by populism or populist leaders at the moment. Brexit is a European example, Donald Trump an American, and Duterte a Philippine one. The implications of populism for democracy and world peace are a vital issue that definitely needs further research.