Japan's Strategic Culture: Security Identity in a Fourth Modern Incarnation?

Abstract

Japan has shown three distinct strategic cultures since its emergence as a modern state in the 19th century: isolationist and non-military, militarist, and post-World War II strategic culture characterized by great reluctance to use military power abroad, even in collective self-defence. This article examines Japan's strategic culture and the potential for a fourth distinct strategic culture through the broader framework of security identity, arguing that this is evolving but has not changed as much as one might expect due to institutionalized antimilitarism and political support for the security practices it has engendered. Contemporary Japanese strategic culture can be understood through debates over recent Japanese security policy as well as actual changes in security practice. Domestic politics and a changing international environment are likely to lead Japan to a somewhat more active military role in the near term, but an analysis based on the dynamics of Japan's dominant security identity suggests that its strategic culture will continue to show a reluctance to use or develop military power beyond very limited scenarios, despite vocal efforts by some political actors to increase military activity abroad.

Notes

1. See Jing Sun, Japan and China as Charm Rivals: Soft Power in Regional Diplomacy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012) and Claude Meyer, China or Japan: Which Will Lead Asia? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) for two recent treatments of Japan's economic and soft power diplomacy in Asia.

2. Two monographs that examine Japan's growing military role outside of Japan are Bhubhindar Singh, Japan's Security Identity: From a Peace State to an International State (London: Routledge, 2013) and Lindsay Black, Japan's Maritime Security Strategy: The Japan Coast Guard and Maritime Outlaws (New York: Palgrave, 2014).

3. Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1946) is a classic example of scholarship informed by Japan's conduct in the Pacific War/World War II. In the postwar period, countless scholars have used Japan's ‘pacifist’ culture or ‘victim identity’ to explain what was considered Japan's unusual approach to military security during the Cold War. Thomas Berger, The Politics of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) provides a critical analysis of many such works.

4. See, for example, Michael Green, Japan's Reluctant Realism: Foreign Policy Challenges in an Era of Uncertain Power (New York: Palgrave, 2001) and Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (New York: Public Affairs/Perseus Books Group, 2007).

5. For example, Pyle, Japan Rising (note 4); Richard Samuels, Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Andrew L. Oros, Normalizing Japan: Politics, Identity, and the Evolution of Security Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Christopher W. Hughes, Japan's Remilitarization (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 2009).

6. Alan Macmillan, Ken Booth, and Russell Trood, ‘Strategic Culture’, in Ken Booth and Russell Trood (eds), Strategic Cultures in the Asia-Pacific Region (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), p. 8.

7. Macmillan, Booth, and Trood, ‘Strategic Culture’ (note 6) identify this ‘referent group’ issue as the first of seven theoretical and empirical ‘problems’ with the use of the concept of strategic culture (pp. 8–9).

8. William Tow suggests a similar point in ‘Strategic Cultures in Comparative Perspective’, in Booth and Trood, Strategic Cultures (note 6), p. 323.

9. For example, Alan Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012), pp. 437–461.

10. As argued in Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), however, it is not necessarily the case that a society would develop a dominant security identity – which introduces a different set of questions about how security policy is crafted in a state that lacks a dominant security identity.

11. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), p. 3. This work elaborates on the definition thusly: ‘A security identity is a set of collectively held principles that have attracted broad political support regarding the appropriate role of state action in the security arena and are institutionalized into the policy-making process … providing an overarching framework recognized both by top decision makers and by major societal actors under which a state shapes its security practices’ (p. 9).

12. World Bank statistics (2012), http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/GDP-ranking-table (accessed 17 March 2014).

13. Meyer, China or Japan (note 1), p. 91.

14. Ibid., pp. 121, 118.

15. SIPRI Yearbook 2013 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) reports Japanese defence spending in 2012 as number five in the world, with spending levels virtually identical to number four (United Kingdom) and number six (France). The top three defence spenders, in order, are the United States, China, and Russia.

16. Naoko Sajima provides an excellent historical overview of Japanese strategic culture rooted in Japan's geography and history in ‘Japan: Strategic Culture at a Crossroads’, in Booth and Trood, Strategic Cultures (note 6), pp. 69–91.

17. Christopher W. Hughes, Japan's Security Agenda: Military, Economic, and Environmental Dimensions (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004) provides an English-language overview of Japan's postwar ‘comprehensive security’ strategy.

18. For example, Japan's defence white paper, Defense of Japan 2012 (Tokyo: Erklaren) includes a ‘column’ (sidebar) entitled ‘Importance of Initial Response within 72 Hours in Saving Human Lives’, which stresses this mission of the SDF and includes the popular animated image of one member from each of the three branches of the SDF: air, ground, and maritime (p. 199).

19. Defense of Japan 2012 (p. 473) cites longitudinal survey data from Japan's Cabinet Office showing that 91.7 per cent of Japanese had a ‘good impression’ of the SDF in the survey conducted in January 2012. This is a substantial increase from the 67.5 per cent who held this view in February 1991 or the 80.3 per cent who held this view in January 2003.

20. ‘BBC Global Poll: Japan Has Most Positive Influence in the World’, Japan Probe, 16 May 2012; and ‘BBC Poll: Germany Most Popular Country in the World’, BBC.com, 23 May 2013.

21. In this sense, such efforts might be linked to realist notions of ‘reassurance’ – an argument advanced by Paul Midford, ‘The Logic of Reassurance and Japan's Grand Strategy’, Security Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2002), pp. 1–43.

22. Andrew L. Oros, ‘Democracy in Action in Japan's Foreign and Security Policy Making’, Education about Asia, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2011), pp. 58–61.

23. This point is developed further in Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), p. 4.

24. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), chapter 2 describes the establishment and evolution of this security identity over the course of the early postwar and Cold War periods.

25. Saadia M. Pekkanen and Paul Kallender-Umezu, In Defense of Japan: From the Market to the Military in Space Policy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010) offers multiple examples of such cross-over, especially in the introductory chapter.

26. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5) offers several detailed examples in areas such as Japan's arms export policies, its development of missile defence capabilities, and even deployment of its SDF abroad in limited areas in the post-Cold War period.

27. Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) makes a similar point in his analysis of Chinese strategic culture.

28. Bloomfield, ‘Time to Move On’ (note 9), p. 450.

29. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), p. 12.

30. These actions are shaped by the dominant security identity of domestic antimilitarism through three primary channels: (1) its influence on policy rhetoric; (2) its structuring of public opinion and the coalition-building opportunities this enables; and (3) its institutionalization into the policymaking process. See Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), chapter 1 for a full discussion of these channels. Each of these types of effect is seen via the specific political actors examined in this section.

31. Jeffrey W. Legro, Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 162.

32. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5) elaborates on this point (pp. 4–6), and in chapter 2 discusses at a more theoretical level the ways in which the security identity shapes policy outcomes.

33. The complete text of Article 9 reads: ‘1. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. 2. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized’. Japan Defense Agency, Defense of Japan 2005, p. 565.

34. Andrew L. Oros, ‘The Domestic and International Politics of Constitutional Change in Japan’, Education about Asia, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Winter 2008), pp. 39–44 explains the politics of constitutional revision in greater detail.

35. There is not a consistent translation of the Japanese hoseikyoku into English; it often appears as Cabinet Legislative Bureau as well. This institution has rarely been analysed – or even mentioned – in English-language scholarship on Japan. See Patrick Boyd and Richard Samuels, Nine Lives? The Politics of Constitutional Reform in Japan, Policy Studies No. 19 (Honolulu: East-West Center, 2005) for an extended discussion of the history and politics of the institution.

36. Boyd and Samuels, Nine Lives? (note 35) provides several examples.

37. ‘Government Interpretation of the Right of Collective Self-Defense’, printed in Defense of Japan 2008 (Tokyo: Urban Connections, 2008), p. 110.

38. ‘Abe Pick Sets Stage for Collective Defense OK’, Japan Times, 2 August 2013.

39. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), chapter 2, is centred on how the hegemonic security identity of domestic antimilitarism was constructed from 1945–1960 and maintained during the Cold War period. Chapter 3 illustrates how the security identity was maintained and adapted to a new environment in the early post-Cold War period.

40. A more detailed discussion of the party politics of Japan's Cold War-era security identity is provided in Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), chapter 2.

41. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), chapter 7 argues that the hegemonic security identity of domestic antimilitarism continued to set the boundaries and to shape political debate even in the 1998–2007 period, when others have argued that Japan's security identity, or strategic culture, had shifted.

42. The complete text of these Guidelines is available from Japan's Ministry of Defense website, at http://www.mod.go.jp/e/d_act/d_policy/pdf/guidelinesFY2011.pdf

43. Andrew L. Oros and Yuki Tatsumi, Global Security Watch: Japan (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010) provide a larger overview of the role of MOFA in the security planning process (pp. 28–30).

44. Oros and Tatsumi, Global Security Watch (note 42), p. 33.

45. Oros and Tatsumi, Global Security Watch (note 42) provide a larger overview of the role of the MOD in the security planning process (pp. 32–35).

46. Oros and Tatsumi, Global Security Watch (note 42) provide overviews of the role of these institutions in Japan's national security policymaking process (pp. 30–32 and 35–40).

47. Tomohito Shinoda, Koizumi Diplomacy: Japan's Kantei Approach to Foreign and Defense Affairs (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2007) provides an excellent overview of the early stages of the strengthening of these institutions under Prime Minister Koizumi's leadership.

48. Defense of Japan 2012 (note 18), p. 408; China data are based on the Finance Budget Report to the National People's Congress. Note that when calculated in US dollars, Japan's defence spending did ‘increase’ in some of these years due to fluctuating exchange rates, as noted in the authoritative SIPRI Yearbooks.

49. Defense of Japan 2012 (note 18), p. 474.

50. Paul Midford, Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism? (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) provides a compelling analysis of the effect of public opinion on the formulation of security policy by elites.

51. Oros, Normalizing Japan (note 5), chapter 7 includes tables that list major security challenges and policy responses from 1998–2007. Samuels, Securing Japan (note 5); Hughes, Japan's Remilitarization (note 5); and Midford, Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion (note 49), among others, also examine this period in book-length detail, in addition to dozens of significant journal articles on the subject.

52. Defense of Japan 2012 (note 18), p. 115; this document summarizes the 2010 NDPG and contrasts it with earlier NDPG on pp. 115–29.

53. The complete text of these Guidelines is available from Japan's Ministry of Defense website, at http://www.mod.go.jp/j/approach/agenda/guideline/2014/pdf/20131217_e2.pdf

54. Japan National Security Council, National Security Strategy (Provisional English Translation), 17 December 2013, at http://japan.kantei.go.jp/96_abe/documents/2013/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2013/12/17/NSS.pdf