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During the cold war the United States was overwhelmingly central in Japan's security policy. Japan hosted US bases and the Self-Defense Forces held joint exercises with the US military, even while shunning contacts with other militaries. Japan essentially refused even to discuss security with its neighbors. Special exceptions were made for the United States in otherwise sweeping policies, such as the exception for the United States in Tokyo's ban on weapons exports and co-development. Since the end of the cold war, Japan's security policy has undergone a little noticed transformation: it has steadily moved away from being centered on the United States as its sole security partner. Tokyo has initiated bilateral security dialogues with its Asian neighbors and assumed a leadership role in promoting regional multilateral security cooperation as a supplement to the US alliance. Japan has begun building bilateral security partnerships with a range of countries and actors, from Australia and India to the European Union. Paradoxically these changes have occurred even as the US-Japan alliance has strengthened. The articles in this special issue examine these new security ties with states and multilateral organizations, and other changes in policy that have made the United States less ‘special,’ such as by allowing arms exports to other actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article poses the question of why, after having consistently pursued an isolationist strategy of avoiding security ties with partners other than the US, and having followed the US in opposing regional security multilateralism, did Japan suddenly reverse course and get out in front of the US with its first post-war regional security initiative. This article addresses this question by tracing the internal debates, policy process and motivations that drove Japan to reverse its position, a process that transformed Japan into the leading champion of regional security multilateralism in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This mini special issue introduces readers to an important, but often overlooked intellectual current in post-war Japan: realism. While most attention has focused on pacifism and anti-militarism, this issue reveals the important contributions made by Japanese realists, and how they creatively incorporated elements of pacifism, anti-militarism and even progressivism into forms of realism that arguably made a unique and creative contribution to global realist theory. This issue translates in full into English for the first time major essays by two of the best known post-war realists in Japan: Kōsaka Masataka and Nagai Yōnosuke. This issue also highlights a major preoccupation for Japanese realists, one evident throughout the Kōsaka and Nagai essays, and for Japanese foreign policy in general: the country's relationship with China and the normalization of relations from the perspective of the second half of the 1960s. The third article in this mini-special issue, a translation of a recent work of diplomatic history, shows to what extent the realist considerations of Kōsaka and Nagai are translated by practitioners at the end of the 1960s into Japanese policy toward China on the eve of Sino-Japanese normalization. These translations provide perspective on the challenges Japan faces today when formulating policy toward a China that has become even more important for Japan than it was already in the 1960s. They highlight the recurrence of several tensions and debates, such as Japan's identity as a “western” versus as an East Asian nation, how to deal with a confrontational China, the role of military power versus diplomacy, and how to balance relations between China and the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the EU has a potentially important and unique role to play as a security partner for Japan. The EU, as the broadest grouping of liberal democracies that embraces a broad political spectrum from conservatives to social democrats, can help Japan to redefine its international security role beyond the narrower confines of the US-Japan alliance. This article tests this hypothesis in two potentially promising areas of security cooperation: post-conflict reconstruction operations and counter-piracy deployments off the coast of Somalia. The EU has great potential to help Japan expand its overseas security role precisely because the EU is not controversial or polarizing in Japan, unlike some aspects of the US alliance, especially those related to overseas SDF deployments. Cooperation with the EU can help Japan re-legitmate overseas deployments, disassociate these from the use of force, the controversial ‘normal nation’ discourse in Japan, and expand them into more ambitious, but non-combat areas. Military cooperation with the EU overseas also largely eschews the fears of entrapment that feature prominently in Japanese overseas military cooperation with the US. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Japan's nuclear strategy and their desire for tactical freedom. Kenneth N. Waltz and Christopher Layne, two eminent authors, have made predictions that after the cold war, Japan would develop nuclear weapons and seek strategic independence. However, these predictions have been proving wrong till date. During and after the cold war, Japan has imposed restrictions on the use of military force and shown heavy dependence on the U.S. for Japanese security. Japan's outlier footing poses a challenge to the theory of balance of power.

Why, in July 1991, did Japan suddenly reverse years of opposition to regional security multilateralism in East Asia, and propose a multilateral security dialogue? This study argues that two factors largely account for the so-called Nakayama proposal. First, after the Gulf War and in the midst of Soviet collapse, Japan concluded that it would have to play a larger international security role. Second, Japan realized that as a consequence it would need to expand its efforts to reassure Asian countries mistrustful of Japanese military power as a result of historical experience. Japanese policy-makers thus came to conceive of a multilateral security dialogue as a means for reassuring Asian countries about its plan to send troops overseas to participate in United Nations peacekeeping. Secondary factors contributing to Japan's decision to promote security multilateralism include the declining Soviet threat, fear of American withdrawal, and competition from other countries with differing conceptions of what form security multilateralism should assume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]