GOVERNING INSECURITY IN JAPAN: The Domestic Discourse and Policy Response. Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series, 50. Edited by Wilhelm Vosse, Reinhard Drifte and Verena Blechinger-Talcott. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xvii, 180 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-81130-9.
JAPAN’S CIVIL-MILITARY DIPLOMACY: The Banks of the Rubicon. Politics in Asia Series. By Dennis T. Yasutomo. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xviii, 192 pp. US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-71129-6.
There is growing interest in Japan’s security policies due to Japan’s rising tensions with China (the world’s number two military spender), revisionist claims regarding Japan’s Second World War experience by Japanese cabinet members, including Prime Minister Abe and his supporters, and due to several high-profile changes in Japan’s security policies themselves in the past several years. Readers of these two volumes will be exposed to a more nuanced and broader conceptualization of Japanese security than seen in mainstream news coverage and also treated to a rich panoply of empirical data and insider stories regarding Japan’s contemporary security practices and security concerns. Both volumes are recommended, but are directed to different audiences: Japan’s Civil-Military Diplomacy is especially suited for those seeking a detailed account of the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF) recent deployments overseas (especially to Iraq, 2004–2006) and of the changes to Japan’s civil-military relations this has required; Governing Insecurity in Japan is for those seeking a broader overview of the security challenges Japanese perceive themselves to be facing in the twenty-first century, from nuclear weapons and missile attack to crime from undocumented immigrants and dangers of contaminated food.
Yasutomo (Smith College) makes a more important contribution to our understanding of Japan’s contemporary security practices (and also Japan’s foreign aid policies) than his somewhat obtuse book title suggests. This book provides the definitive English-language account of the most significant JSDF overseas deployment since their creation in 1954, to Iraq from January 2004–July 2006, in two chapters of this five-chapter book. In addition, the book recounts Japan’s important contribution to the reconstruction of Afghanistan from 2001–2013, which did not involve deployment of the JSDF but nevertheless required new civil-military cooperation in Japan’s overseas development assistance (ODA) policies. In addition, the opening chapter provides a concise history of Japan’s civil-military relations as well as a primer on the evolution of Japan’s ODA policy (the subject of a book Yasutomo published in 1986). A concluding chapter focuses on the extent to which Japan has “crossed the Rubicon” in its security policies in the cases examined. Yasutomo argues throughout the volume (to a somewhat tedious degree): “Japan has not crossed the Rubicon in the traditional sense, and is not likely to anytime soon” (16). He does argue, however, that “a new civil-military security culture is replacing the old merchant state culture of pacifism and antimilitarism” (opening summary).
Much of the first chapter of Japan’s Civil-Military Diplomacy is devoted to an examination of the concept of a “civilian power,” contrasting the use of the term in Europe, the United States and Japan—a comparative context that is informative and germane to a broad readership beyond those who focus on Japan. He concludes this first chapter with these words: “For Japan, civilian power diplomacy, with its enlarged civil-military component, is the new normal” (22). The chapters on Afghanistan and Iraq make this case persuasively and are laden with rich empirical detail from a wide range of published sources and interviews. Many readers may not be aware of the extent of Japan’s contribution to the reconstruction of Afghanistan (the number two financial contributor after the United States) after the US toppling of the Taliban. Japan’s ODA coordination with military efforts and objectives may not have “crossed the Rubicon” but they were unprecedented in Japanese ODA policy and in many ways laid the groundwork for Japan’s later engagement with Iraq, including by the JSDF. Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi would later describe Japanese ODA and the JSDF as an “inseparable pair” in Japan’s Iraq policy (77). The detailed discussion of the JSDF deployment to Samawah in terms of logistics, strategy, lessons learned and the positive reception by the local Iraqis should be of broad interest to readers beyond just “Japan hands,” since, as Yasutomo wryly notes, “In the end, the SDF rather than U.S. troops were the ones who received sweets and flowers from Iraqis upon their arrival in Iraq” (105).
It is a shame that Yasutomo did not seek to engage with broader works on Japanese security policy that have been published in the past decade, seeking to enhance or disconfirm those arguments based on the excellent casework he presents on Japan’s Afghanistan and Iraq experiences. There is a notable absence of such works in his bibliography. By contrast, the bibliography includes an impressive number of Japanese-language sources germane to the narrower sub-set of issues he does seek to address: about the evolution of the concept of a civilian power, civil-military relations, and the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Governing Insecurity in Japan provides, by contrast, a great breadth of consideration of how Japanese in the 21st century view their and Japan’s security. The three editors of the volume deserve kudos for assembling such a broad overview, rooted in the concept of “securitization” in vogue among especially European-educated scholars (who constitute the majority of the contributors to this volume). Each of the eight chapters is clearly written and carefully edited, well-argued with research questions stressed at the outset, methods discussed, and central findings summarized in a concluding section. Each chapter also provides a concise historical overview of the specific topic that will be useful to those new to the subject matter. This historical context and framing of the central issues is important since the data presented in most chapters ends around 2010, and sometimes earlier, which is unfortunate given the quickly evolving security environment in East Asia. Nevertheless, the volume collectively makes an important and lasting contribution which future researchers can update with more recent data and in general the time-lag does not appear to undermine the central conclusions of each chapter.
The volume introduction begins rightly by noting the paradox that a country that objectively enjoys so much security in comparison to most other states perceives so much insecurity. The first two empirical chapters of the volume build on this theme, focusing on Japanese public perception of threats to themselves and to Japan. Vosse (International Christian University of Japan) draws on evidence from an innovative cross-national survey that he and colleagues conducted in 2004 that shows that Japanese express a much higher concern about crime than Americans despite an objectively much lower crime rate; and, moreover, that Japanese express a greater fear of the outbreak of a major war and use of weapons of mass destruction, and also of an impending economic crisis. Vosse then draws on other survey data to illustrate an increasing threat perception among Japanese from 2000 to 2006. What is striking in his findings, however, is the divergence in policy prescriptions between Japanese and Americans based on this sense of threat: to a large degree, Japanese are still from Venus and Americans from Mars. Midford (Norwegian University for Science and Technology) follows on the issue of policy prescriptions by examining in-depth survey data and exit polling from the 2007 House of Councillors election, which pitted the nationalist incumbent Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) Prime Minister Abe against the more economic policy-focused challengers from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ); the DPJ win was a major upset for Abe’s party. Midford argues that it is notable that at a time of an objectively escalating external threat from North Korea, Japanese voters chose to focus on economic security issues, rooting his argument in the post-classical realist school.
Three chapters of Governing Insecurity in Japan address the security aspects of immigration to Japan. The most accessible and useful chapter is by Chiavacci (University of Zurich), which situates the immigration question in the context of Japan’s shrinking population (since 2010) and aging demographic profile. He argues that the two dominant and conflicting “frames” of the present immigration debate—that immigrant workers should be imported to address the demographic challenge and that immigrants commit more domestic crime—are both mistaken, and that a more realistic and pragmatic discussion over immigration should take place. Quite striking is a table (121) that shows the number of immigrants that would be needed each year just to maintain Japan’s currently challenging demographic profile—which would lead to a total population for Japan of over 800 million by 2050 (compared to about 128 million today)! His discussion of the methodological flaws in reporting on crime statistics and coverage of the ugly nationalist discourse on immigration will be informative to a broad audience. His characterization of the debate differs somewhat from the chapter by Vogt (University of Hamburg), who purports to focus on the “discourse” over immigration in Japan, a contrast which is unacknowledged by either author. Vogt is strong on the comparative perspective (contrasting Japan with Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea) and in examining the institutional actors involved in the debate within Japan. Kibe (International Christian University of Japan) contributes to the issue by examining the debate over the Japanese version of multiculturalism, tabunka kyōsei. Like many of the contributors to the volume as a whole, he argues that the current approach to managing this perceived security challenge is not working but that in a shifting political environment with frequent leadership turnover and a wide range of bureaucratic actors with overlapping responsibilities, how to go about crafting a new set of policies is unclear. Collectively the three chapters suggest that a significant change in the immigration status quo in the near-term is unlikely.
The remaining chapters in Governing Insecurity in Japan address the issue of food security, the recent growth of Chinese investment in Japan, and Japan’s experience with overseas peacekeeping and related activities since 1992. Takeda (University of Tokyo) addresses the issue of food security, beginning with a broad overview of the history of this concern back to the pre-war period and situating the concerns more recently in a global context. The chapter concludes, however, with a strong condemnation of “neoliberal political reform” that accelerated under Prime Minister Koizumi (2001–06) and continues despite what she argues are obvious shortcomings in the wake of the March 11, 2011 nuclear meltdown at Fukushima that left the Japanese people to manage food risks of radioactive contamination with little effective government assistance. Drifte (formerly of Newcastle University) sketches out the contours of recent Japanese concerns about rapidly growing Chinese investment in Japan, framing it in the context of recent growth of Chinese foreign investment globally, but is not able to offer much by way of analysis in only seven and a half pages. Still, his contribution adds to the breadth of the volume in illustrating the range of security concerns contemporary Japanese perceive, and also links to concerns expressed in the Takeda chapter regarding imports of contaminated food from China. Mulloy (Daito Bunka University) returns to themes developed in greater depth in Yasumoto’s Japan’s Civil-Military Diplomacy. It is surprising how little attention Mulloy pays to the significant departure from previous red-lines in overseas deployment of the JSDF that the Iraq mission heralded. Rather, this chapter categorizes the five civilian and nine JSDF overseas deployments under the 1992 International Peace Cooperation Law and subsequent legislation into four different types of missions and then evaluates each category, with common themes of risk aversion, bureaucratic stove-piping, and narrow missions emerging, despite writing in his conclusion that “the JSDF have usually performed above expectation, professionally, and have contributed to local human security” (169).
Taken together, these two volumes illustrate the many challenges the Japanese government faces in addressing new and continuing threats to Japan’s security at a time of frequent political leadership transitions, continuing economic stagnation, and a rapidly evolving regional and global security environment. They usefully guide readers beyond persistently conveyed images of Japan as an unimportant or unevolving global security actor.
Andrew L. Oros
Washington College, Chestertown, USA
pp. 917-921