Between East and West: Japanese IR at a crossroads

Abstract

That East Asian IR communities are increasingly interested in knowledge production has become self-evident. While the form that this interest is taken in China is predominantly focused on developing a Chinese School of International Relations Theory (IRT), the situation in Japan is much more diverse and complicated. This article examines the impact of the non-Western IRT movement on Japanese IR academia from a sociology of science perspective. It finds that while indigenous theorizing has garnered interests in a portion of Japanese IR academia due to both internal and external driving forces, there have been few claims for and actual theorizing on a ‘Japanese brand-name’ in IRT like the ‘Chinese School.’ The majority of Japanese IR scholars remain strongly attached to mainstream IRT or the traditional historical and area studies. Such development has its roots in the structural restraints embedded in Japan’s unresolved identity as a de facto polity situated between ‘East and West’ and the heritage of its war-time history. Given these characteristics of IR studies in Japan, the different components of Japanese IR academia will most likely follow their own trajectory without integration and synthesis. This will position Japanese IR, just like its current foreign policy, at a crossroads.

Keywords:

• non-Western IR
• post-Western IR
• East Asian IR Theory
• Japanese IR
• Kyoto School of philosophy
• sociology of science

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Prof. William Tow, Dr Mathew Davies and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the earlier drafts of this article. The author would also like to express her most sincere gratitude to all Japanese scholars who agreed to participate in this research as interviewees. Prior discussions with Felix Rösch and Atsuko Watanabe also helped clarify some issues in this research, which is much appreciated. Any errors contained herein are the author’s own.

Notes

1 In term of academic institutions, the Japan Association of International Relations (JAIR), established in 1956, now has 2,022 members (as of the end of March 2018). Meanwhile, the Korean Association of International Studies, established in 1956, now has 1,300 members. China National Association for International Studies was founded later in 1980. Information was retrieved from the websites of relevant Associations and Universities.

2 Given the relatively large size of the Japanese IR academic community, I focus mainly on those Japanese scholars who have been proactively engaged in the global debate over non-/post-Western IR since 2007. In fact, there are many foreign-based scholars such as Felix Rösch, Paul Bacon, Chih-yu Shih, and Shogo Suzuki who have also written about Japanese IR. However, because the aim of this research is to explore the institutional and national contexts of Japan, the term ‘Japanese scholars’ in this research is used interchangeably with Japan-based scholars.

3 In this article, I adopt the conception of Japan’s national identity in a ‘relational’ rather than a ‘norm constructivist’ understanding. This mean identity is said to be constituted by ‘demarcations between domestic and international, identity and difference, or Self and Other’ (Hagstrom & Gustafsson, 2015, p. 5).

4 Information was retrieved from the official websites of relevant Universities as well as via this author’s personal interviews with Japanese scholars.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thuy T. Do

Thuy T Do is Vice Dean of the Faculty of International Politics and Diplomacy, Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam. She obtained a doctoral degree from the Department of International Relations, Australian National University in 2016. She previously held visiting fellowships at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (Nanyang Technological University), the East – West Center, and Japan’s Institute of International Affairs. Her research interests include IR Theory, East Asian studies, and Vietnam’s foreign policy.