Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xiii, 230 pp. (B&W photos.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-2907-2.
David Leheny is the most innovative constructivist scholar writing on Japan today. In Empire of Hope he introduces a theory of “national emotion” in Japanese political life and transnational relations, guiding the reader through a series of vignettes taken from film, theatre, literature, and public diplomacy that capture a national effort to find hope and legitimacy at a time of declining relative power. His theory of national emotion draws on new work in neuropsychology and the humanities in which emotion is taken not as an independent variable but instead as the object of deliberate construction and political calculation, shaped both by leaders and by broader national narratives in politics and popular culture beyond leaders’ control. The theory, while not strictly testable as a matter of social science, nevertheless adds colour, nuance, and new explanations that would not be apparent in more traditional rational choice approaches to state behaviour.
Leheny offers six vignettes or “sentimental episodes” that focus on Japan’s internal politics and relations with Southeast Asia and the United States since the 1980s. The first vignette centres on the 2000 Ehime Maru incident in which a US Navy nuclear submarine struck and sank a Japanese high school fishing boat off Hawai‘i killing nine on board. The US Navy’s ability to understand the emotional narrative in Japan and respond promptly with high level apologies and a major operation to salvage the sunken ship stood in stark contrast to the emotionally tone-deaf response of the US Army after two young girls were killed by mechanized vehicles in South Korea two years later. The US-Japan alliance emerged from the Ehime Maru incident stronger, while the US-ROK alliance struggled for years to recover. Though Leheny does not touch on the Korea case, the contrast demonstrates the valuable policy lessons his study of national emotion might contain.
The second vignette tells the story of the conjoined Vietnamese twins Nguyen Viet and Nguyen Duc, known as “Beto-chan” and “Doku-chan” in Japan where they were celebrated after their successful separation in a Tokyo hospital in 1986. Seen as victims of Agent Orange and thus American airpower, the twins evoked a deeper sense of shared victimhood in Japan, the only target of American nuclear bombing, and a nation divided over the war in Indochina. Interestingly, it was hawkish Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro who harnessed the story of the twins to demonstrate the solidarity of post-colonial Asia with Japan as he rode to a massive electoral victory at the polls that year. While primarily a story of common humanity, the contest to control the sub-narrative about Japan’s historic relations with the region is revealing.
The third vignette examines the Foreign Ministry’s effort to operationalize Japanese soft power. While government PR exercises are always open to ridicule, this chapter is perhaps too hasty in dismissing Japanese soft power as a “Harvard-validated deus ex machina” (116) solution to deteriorating hard power. In fact, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found in a well-designed survey of Asian soft power in 2008 that Japan stood second only to the United States in the region—a result confirmed by the even more elaborate Samsung Economic Research Institute’s National Brand Dual Octagon survey in 2010. While it remains to be seen exactly how Japan can harness this soft power as a matter of statecraft, there is clearly something more significant at play than this chapter reveals, with skeptical scenes of Ministry of Foreign Affairs diplomats congratulating themselves on coming up with the “Cool Japan” brand.
The fourth vignette introduces Caramel Box, a popular contemporary theater group that presents the stories of individuals facing loneliness and despair over personal choices they made in the past, and the salvation that comes from making new connections to society at large—a metaphor for Japanese relations with Southeast Asia and the United States explored in the earlier chapters. The final vignette tells the poignant story of Kamaishi, a gritty steel town that found new hope for the future after coming together to recover from the death and destruction of the 2011 tsunami.
Leheny is an elegant writer, providing gripping images from the drift pattern of oranges floating above the sunken Ehime Maru to the traumatic split-second decisions of citizens in Kamaishi whether to rush to their children’s schools or return home to their unattended elderly parents as the tsunami warnings sound. In a study of national emotion, the book engages the reader’s own humanity to make its point. It is impossible not to agree with the closing observation that Japan’s own successful search for solutions and hope in the face of natural calamities and demographic crisis is itself the best source of leadership in a world where Japan’s challenges put it “a few pages ahead” (194) of China, Europe, or the United States.
What Empire of Hope misses, like most constructivist studies, is consideration of structural and geopolitical variables. The hope for Japanese leadership is evident not only in cultural narratives within Japan, but there is also a growing recognition in Washington, Canberra, and Delhi that Asia is moving towards a contested multipolarity in which the leading powers must act to prevent coercive Chinese hegemony. As the United States has lost its focus, Japan has stepped in to lead on regional trade and diplomacy, championing the trans-Pacific Partnership after the Trump administration withdrew, and pulling Washington back to the region with the proposal for a joint Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy. In virtually every poll taken in the region, Japan emerges as the most trusted country by a wide margin (except in China and South Korea). In an examination of the search for hope at a time of declining relative national power, it is worth remembering that there is power in the hope that the rest of the region has for Japan.
That said, Empire of Hope should be read above all by those international relations scholars who focus primarily on power. It will challenge their assumptions and enrich their understanding of Japan in ways few other studies have in recent years.
Michael J. Green
Georgetown University, Washington, DC