Sheffield Centre for Japanese Studies/Routledge Series, 48. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2014. xx, 196 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-72883-6.
Since the early 1990s, a growing body of scholarship has disputed the robustness and trajectory of Japan’s postwar security institutions. Japan’s deadlocked relationship with North Korea has been a recurrent theme in this analysis. Here, North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs, and the past kidnapping of Japanese citizens are deemed critical in explaining Japan’s introduction of new military technology, or the strengthening of the US-Japan security alliance. However, many studies stop short of illustrating the causal pathway which links Japan’s exposure to new security challenges and Tokyo’s alleged departure from its postwar pacifism. Thus, providing fresh empirical and theoretical knowledge, Ra Mason’s Japan’s Relations with North Korea and the Recalibration of Risk disentangles the complex dynamics by which these policy changes have unfolded.
As Mason states, the aim of this book is not to show “positivist causal relations or indisputable conclusions” (xv), but to overcome crude explanations of Japan’s response to North Korea which often relinquish policy change to either external (that is, US-induced) pressure or domestic factors. Rooted in a constructivist view on foreign policy, this book employs a risk perspective and untwists the complexity which surrounds concepts of risk, threat, or harm in the field of international relations. Applying the sociological literature on risk most prominently articulated by the late Ulrich Beck’s “risk society,” Mason’s case study of Japan-North Korea relations illustrates how specific challenges at the international level are framed (or recalibrated) in order to create new domestic discourses and thus to open pathways for policy change. He thus offers a perspective that links political, economic, and societal actors as they attempt to influence the framing of North Korea-related public perceptions in Japan.
Theoretical discussion of the risk concept in international relations (chapter 1) is followed by an outline of Japan’s North Korea policy in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War (chapter 2). During this period, Tokyo’s “conciliatory and all-embracing” (49) response to North Korea’s 1993 Nodong missile launch reveals a low-risk calibration of North Korean threats in Japan. While the Nodong missile was capable of targeting Japan, North Korea did not function as a “source of almost absolute evil […] but was painted more as unknown” (53). This changed dramatically with the North’s launch of the long-range Taepodong 1 missile in 1998 which unleashed a new framing of North Korea illustrated in an outflow in media coverage and Diet statements. As such, the events of 1998 have propelled a shift towards a high-risk calibration of North Korea in Japan. Mason argues that the negative framing of North Korea has served as the background for the diffusion of an “anti-North Koreanism” norm (82), adding to the portfolio of norms affecting Japan’s foreign policy such as constitutional pacifism in the form of Article 9 and US-focused security bilateralism. This norm surfaces in the form of a nationalism which targets North Korea-related ethnic Koreans and their organizations in Japan (most prominently Chongryon) and has propelled security policy change. The norm consolidated as a result of North Korean “spy-boat” intrusions in 1999 and 2001, the unfolding of the abduction issue in 2002 (discussed in chapter 4), and the North’s missile and nuclear tests in 2006 as outlined in chapter 5. Japan has introduced new military technology such as satellite surveillance and the US-sponsored ballistic missile defense system in response. As North Korea has gained high-profile media coverage, Tokyo’s risk calibration in response to events such as the 2009 nuclear test has remained stable at a high level as a hawkish policy coalition—most prominently represented by the rise of Abe Shinzō—accumulated influence and the resolution of the abduction issue became a bipartisan policy objective (as discussed in chapters 6 and 7). In this form, even the change in government in 2009 did not result in a new framing of North Korea but instead in the application of a “fixed framing” (146), which resulted in a continuation of Japan’s hardline policy approach towards North Korea, including the continuation of economic sanctions. Thus, the interaction of market, political, and societal actors in Japan has created an “equilibrium” (163) which has not only resulted in diplomatic deadlock between Tokyo and Pyongyang but in which Japan’s responses to North Korea’s military campaigns such as the 2010 sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of the Yeonpyeong Island, or the long-range missile test in 2012 (chapter 8) are “standardised” (170) and thus predicable.
This book employs a mix-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative sources. Thus, in-depth interviews with stakeholders in Japan’s North Korea policy community and contents analysis of Diet minutes are paired with public opinion surveys. In addition, Mason extensively draws on newspaper coverage mainly derived from the liberal Asahi Shimbun, which serves as a feasible litmus test to plot the emergence of a new risk calibration vis-à-vis North Korea which has shifted from a low-risk framing in the early 1990s to a high-risk narrative since 1998. However, several problems remain: first, the attempt to trace the process of risk recalibration as the result of the complex interaction between state, market, and societal actors requires further investigation of the strategic calculations based upon which these actors operate. As constructivist scholars have pointed out, the emergence of new norms is often the result of strategic choices. Second, further debate on the conditions under which new risk framings are likely to generate policy change is required. Thus, how have new forms of media communication and factors such as prolonged economic recession and perceptions of social insecurity since the 1990s, institutional change in the form of a reformed electoral system and bureaucracy, and the decline of the political left affected Japan’s recalibration of risk vis-à-vis North Korea? Avoiding think-theory, an analysis of policy change that extends the focus to other cases such as Japan’s response to risks affiliated with China’s rise or the public’s perception of the safety of nuclear energy in post-Fukushima Japan, may further help to distill critical conditions under which processes of risk recalibration generate policy change. Thus, while this book is required reading for those interested in Japan’s North Korea policy, these critical remarks illustrate how Mason’s risk analysis offers itself to a broader audience willing to apply this innovative approach beyond the field of Japanese studies and national security.
Sebastian Maslow
Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan