Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2021. xv, 328 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 9781438486093.
As a student in the 1990s, I was often exposed to narratives about Japan that revolved around its status as an economic miracle, giant, or superpower, which would probably become a nuclear armed contender for world supremacy, perhaps inevitably in conflict with the United States. This narrative was difficult to reconcile with the concurrently popular image of a peace state. Around this time, however, narratives about Japan began to change, and decline, failure, and crisis became new keywords. These moreover co-varied rather uneasily with the emergence of a remilitarization narrative.
This edited volume presents a comprehensive overview of developments in Japan in recent decades, focusing on decline, crisis, and failure, and an analysis of how these have been narrated and acted on by policymakers. For all of us who have lost touch with Japan a little during three years of pandemic and travel restrictions, this book helps reconnect with various developments in and debates about the country. All 10 chapters are thoroughly researched and well-written, and draw in an exemplary fashion on data and existing scholarship, much of it in Japanese.
The first part analyzes various social problems. David Chiavacci argues that inequality in Japan has risen less dramatically than crisis narratives suggest, but also that the country was not as equal as preceding narratives suggested. Hiroko Takeda demonstrates how policymakers have exploited narratives about the family to encourage higher birth rates in order to deal with various economic and sociopolitical problems, but thereby disempowered women as reified mothers. One policy area that has suffered due to low birth rates is university education. Jeremy Breaden shows how this has remained an object of desire, always slightly out of reach, and how constant education reform has served to reproduce some of the problems it was meant to resolve.
The second part addresses economic and governance problems. Koichi Hasegawa focuses on the triple disasters of March 3, 2011 to show that the kind of political and bureaucratic infighting that forestalled effective crisis management also underpinned the nuclear incident in the first place. Iris Wieczorek, meanwhile, argues that crisis narratives have enabled an innovation- and entrepreneurship-friendly ecosystem, albeit one that differs from the model of Silicon Valley. By contrast, Saori Shibata clarifies how Abenomics failed to alleviate a series of other problems, and instead served to aggravate some of them.
The last part analyzes security policy. Paul O’Shea demonstrates how the ascription of foreign policy failure to the 2009–2012 administration of the Democratic Party of Japan contributed to the party’s downfall and the re-emergence of the Liberal Democratic Party. Raymond Yamamoto outlines how narratives about China first served to delegitimize Official Development Assistance as a foreign policy instrument, and then revamped it as a way of countering China’s rise. Ra Mason and Sebastian Maslow argue that narratives about a threatening North Korea enabled Japanese security and defense policy to move away from pacifism, but also made Japanese policymaking inflexible regarding international policy changes toward Pyongyang. Shogo Suzuki, finally, analyzes how Japanese conservatives have coped with China and South Korea’s relative increase in prosperity by emphasizing how Japan excels in other areas.
All the chapters draw explicitly on Colin Hay’s work on conceptualizing crisis and, in so doing, address both “subjective constructions” of crisis through narratives and “‘objective’ failures” (12). There is, however, a tension between the two throughout the book, and while the chapters in the first part vacillate between the two understandings of crisis, the chapters in the second part emphasize the latter, and those in the third part focus more on the former.
While the chapters recognize that narratives produce political effects, they operate with rather thin conceptions of narrative. Like the burgeoning literatures on disinformation, information warfare etc., they imply the possibility of an objective representation of social reality. In that sense, narrative is portrayed as a diversion from reality, or a problem, that could and should be avoided or rectified. Attempts to falsify narratives in the book, however, imply a privileged access to social reality that is seldom possible. Some chapters therefore partly overlook how objective accounts also draw on and construct narratives, and that objectively detected failures may have been produced in part by the spread of such narratives.
Moreover, and again like the research on disinformation, these chapters cast policymakers as the main drivers of narrative dissemination. The concept of “meta-narrative” is a case in point. It is reduced here to the aggregated sum of narratives spread by agents and the chapters do not investigate whether or how previously existing narratives might at times shape narrative entrepreneurship (Linus Hagström and Karl Gustafsson, “The limitations of strategic narratives: The Sino-American struggle over the meaning of COVID-19,” Contemporary Security Policy, 42, no. 4 [2021]). A more intersubjective understanding of narrative could arguably have directed more focus on the question of narrative resonance and dominance, beyond the use of examples or mere stipulation.
Some lack of clarity and theoretical depth regarding the concept of narrative notwithstanding, this book provides multifaceted and fascinating accounts of the many problems that Japan has faced in recent decades. As Suzuki notes in his chapter, there is certainly something narcissistic about the existence in Japan of concomitant and intertwined narratives that alternate between exaggerated accounts of the self’s weakness and an unfaltering aspiration toward greatness, seen in so many policy areas in Japan (cf. Linus Hagström, “Great power narcissism and ontological (in)security: The narrative mediation of greatness and weakness in international politics,” International Studies Quarterly, 65, no. 2 [2021]). The book shows that some Japanese social problems need to be taken seriously, yet another lesson is that the hyperbole in crisis language can at times be counterproductive, and that Japan could in many policy areas be depicted as “good enough” already.
Linus Hagström
Swedish Defence University, Stockholm