New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. xviii, 361 pp. (Figures, tables, maps.) US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16788-8.
This carefully researched book looks at how Japanese social actors have mobilized in response to China’s rise in the twenty-first century. It builds on comprehensive insight into both the Japanese and English literature on how Japan has reacted to the increasing activity and influence of China. The author has had remarkably good access to some of Japan’s major politicians: four prime ministers, four foreign ministers, and two cabinet secretaries (one of whom later became a prime minister) have been interviewed. Overall, the picture drawn is that there are a variety of opinions on China in Japan, but an increasing number of people are skeptical of the Japanese government’s ability to negotiate agreements with Beijing.
The first of the book’s seven chapters gives a brief overview of diplomatic tensions between Japan and China in recent years and introduces the cases that will be examined. Chapter 2 begins with a broad presentation of China’s rise and moves on to describe the maneuvers by Japan and the United States in the early 1970s that led to their establishment of diplomatic relations with China. It ends with a presentation of the policies toward China advocated by the main political and business groups. The next four chapters examine the impact on Japan of disagreement with China in four fields.
Visits by Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, an institution
with an unrepentant attitude to Japan’s past wars, is criticized by China. The analysis shows that Nippon Izokukai, which is both a policy advocacy group representing those who lost family members in World War II and an important vote gatherer for the Liberal Democratic Party, has taken a moderate stance on the shrine in recent years. Nevertheless, support for Yasukuni by Prime Minister Koizumi and others made it difficult to establish a new, more neutral national facility to memorialize the country’s war dead.
Under new UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) rules that were ratified in 1996, Japan and China had to negotiate maritime boundaries. Japan proposed a median line to divide the East China Sea, whereas China claimed an exclusive economic zone that extended far beyond that line. It took many years for Japan to develop a policy to achieve its interests under the new UNCLOS rules, and some politicians blamed this delay on diffusion of authority over maritime issues among several ministries. In order to achieve better coordination, the Japanese government passed a new oceans law and established a Headquarters for Ocean Policy at the Prime Minister’s Official Residence in 2007.
Several people in Japan fell ill in 2008 when they ate frozen Chinese dumplings that were found to contain poison. This brought attention to the increasing dependence on food imports from China. In Japan, food importers reacted by seeking to have Chinese factories meet Japanese food safety standards. The scandal also stimulated the establishment of Japan’s first Consumer Affairs Agency, and Shufuren (Japan Housewives Association) played a role in deliberations about the new agency’s mandate.
China disputes Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Therefore, Beijing reacted strongly in 2010 when a Chinese fishing trawler captain was arrested near the islands and in 2012 when the Japanese government purchased them from a private owner and “nationalized” them. China sent its own patrol ships to the islands after the events in 2012. These two incidents furthered Japanese moves already under way to strengthen the defense of the islands, to start training Japanese self-defense forces in amphibious operations together with US forces, and to give the Japan Coast Guard policing authority over the country’s remote islands.
Japan’s response to the rise of China has thus been characterized by a diversity of social groups advocating policy on China, incremental problem solving, and adaptation. Groups as diverse as Nippon Izokukai and Shufuren were often critical of the government’s deference to Chinese interests. As maritime affairs were handled by several ministries with insufficient coordination, it took nearly ten years to develop a policy on the implications of new UNCLOS rules for the East China Sea. Difficulties in negotiating policy with Beijing in various fields seldom led to Japanese accommodation or confrontation but more often to adaptation. For example, Japan made a new oceans law and established a new agency for consumer affairs, and as a result of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands conflict, strengthened cooperation between the Maritime Self-Defense Forces and the Japan Coast Guard.
In this way, the book charts the effect of the opinions of social groups and domestic institutions on foreign policy choices toward China. This is a valuable contribution to a field where most of the focus has been on the perspective of the elite. The analysis would, however, benefit by bringing in other factors as well, some of which belong to the international level of analysis. One such factor is the degree to which Japan views China as a threat. One way to gauge this is by looking at the strength of China’s military capabilities compared to Japan’s and whether the Japanese perceive China’s intentions to be in any way aggressive. Japan’s policy choices are also affected by the balance that it must strike in its alliance policy to avoid being abandoned by the US while also avoiding entrapment in a conflict involving the US that it wants to keep away from. Such factors, in addition to the ones examined in the book, have contributed to Japan’s policy of having a close economic relationship with China while maintaining a strong alliance with the US, and in recent years, reorganizing its self-defense forces so that they can respond to contingencies in parts of Japanese territory that lie close to China.
Eivind Lande
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
pp. 899-900