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Japan is emerging as a more prominent global and regional military power, defying traditional categorisations of a minimalist contribution to the US-Japan alliance, maintaining anti-militarism, seeking an internationalist role, or carving out more strategic autonomy. Instead, this Element argues that Japan has fundamentally shifted its military posture over the last three decades and traversed into a new categorisation of a more capable military power and integrated US ally. This results from Japan's recognition of its fundamentally changing strategic environment that requires a new grand strategy and military doctrines. The shift is traced across the national security strategy components of Japan Self-Defence Forces' capabilities, US-Japan alliance integration, and international security cooperation. The Element argues that all these components are subordinated inevitably to the objectives of homeland security and re-strengthening the US-Japan alliance, and thus Japan's development as international security partner outside the ambit of the bilateral alliance remains stunted. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Abe era has produced a significant increase in Japan’s geopolitical assertiveness, which is likely to endure.\ud \ud

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the main extant international relations (IR) theories that have been utilized and developed to analyze and explain patterns of Japan’s international behaviour by looking at Japan’s changing international and domestic environments and to outline the multiple IR approaches used in the case of Japan. Alongside traditional Western-oriented or Eurocentric IR theory, the objective of this chapter is to clearly explicate and navigate through these debates to arrive at a clear set of frameworks for better analyzing the evolving trends in Japan’s international trajectory.

This chapter revaluates the utility of militarization as a framework for comprehending Japan’s changing military stance, and to challenge many current analyses that portray Japan’s security trajectory as one of essential continuity. The concept of militarization assists in identifying those military components—institutional and ideological in nature—present in all societies, including Japan, which are subject to contestation and alteration and open the way to substantive change in military security policy. The first section of the chapter outlines Japan’s self-declared and self-imposed constraints on its military posture in the immediate postwar and Cold War periods to establish the baselines against which any shifts toward remilitarization can be evaluated. The sections thereafter systematically assess these baselines and the degree of subsequent shift in the post–Cold War and contemporary periods—in terms of legal and constitutional constraints on military power, procurement of new military capabilities, increases in defense budgets, civil-military relations, the export of military technologies, and external and alliance military commitments. The concluding section, in assessing the overall trajectory of Japan’s military posture, and arguing that there has been substantial change rather than continuity, then considers the interrelationship with and challenges for the quality of Japanese democracy.

Despite its constrained military stance in the post-war period, Japan has continued to ascribe importance to the maintenance of an effective indigenous defence production base as a tool of statecraft for ensuring a degree of autonomous defence and leverage in the US-Japan alliance relationship. Japan developed a specific model that embeds a defence production capability in larger civilian conglomerates, and this ensured a high degree of domestic self-sufficiency and autonomy, and footholds in sophisticated weapons systems. However, in recent years, due to limited defence budgets and relative isolation from international trends in co-development and export opportunities, Japan’s defence industry has been perceived to fall behind international competitors and risk a ‘slow-death’. Japanese policy-makers and industry have attempted to maintain an indigenous capability by improving procurement, new domestic production projects, and now opening up to cooperation with the US and other partners and lifting the self-imposed ban on the export of military technology. The impact of these policies is yet to be seen, but it is clear that Japan needs to master international cooperation more effectively and also carefully manage its relations with the US and importation of defence systems so as to avoid the potential capture of its domestic industry.

Japan’s security discourse – despite accelerating shifts in its security stance over the last two decades, and more recently, under the Abe administration – remains dominated by views of essential continuity and maintenance of the “Yoshida Doctrine.” The case of Japan’s militarization of space is used to create a framework for systematically dismantling default assumptions about the durability of the Yoshida Doctrine. The militarization of space serves as a driver of broader trends in Japan’s security policy manifested in the procurement of dual-use assets in launch systems, communications and intelligence satellites, and counterspace capabilities necessary for active internal and external balancing with the US–Japan alliance; the strengthening domestically of security policymaking institutions; and the jettisoning of anti-militaristic norms. Japan’s increasingly assertive military stance, bolstering of the US–Japan alliance and cessation of hedging, facing down of China’s rise, and departure from the Yoshida Doctrine as grand strategy are thus revealed as hiding in plain sight.\ud \ud

Japan has featured prominently in The Pacific Review (TPR) since the journal's inception; and the very first issue in 1988 was essentially a Japan special issue with four out of six articles devoted to considering the implications of the country's then seemingly relentless rise as a regional and increasingly global power. Thereafter, TPR has carefully documented Japan's changing international pathway, forming indispensable reading for all Japan experts. TPR has always been distinguished by a rare ability to question the conventional wisdom on the study of Japan.

The government of Abe Shinzō and various commentators tout Japan’s moves during 2014–15 to breach the ban on collective self-defense as moderation and continuity in postwar security policy. This article unpacks the supposed limitations on exercise of the right and marks this as a watershed moment in Japan’s development of a radical security trajectory as an alliance and international security partner. The changing international security environment and growing acceptance of the indivisibility of U.S.-Japan security interests, coupled with hollow domestic legal, political, and bureaucratic constraints, heighten the likelihood Japan will use force to assist the United States.

Japan has been overlooked as a ‘cyber power’ but it now becoming a serious player in this new strategic domain. Japanese policy-makers have forged a consensus to move cybersecurity to the very core of national security policy, to create more centralized frameworks for cybersecurity, and for Japan’s military institutions to build dynamic cyberdefense capabilities. Japan’s stance has moved rapidly toward the securitization and now militarization of responses to cyber challenges. Japan’s cybersecurity stance has bolstered US–Japan alliance responses to securing all dimensions of the ‘global commons’ and extended its defense perimeter to further deter but potentially raise tensions with China.

Japan's lifting of its arms export ban through the Three Principles on the Transfer of Defense Equipment and Technology has opened up new strategic opportunities for its policy-makers to reinforce existing, and build new, security partnerships. Japan still retains the intent to sustain and develop an indigenous defense production base, now through international collaboration rather than mainly autonomous production, and the leverage this may provide to hedge within and outside the US–Japan alliance framework. However, this paper demonstrates that Japan's principal objective through international arms transfers is very much to use this as a mechanism to strengthen Japan's integration of capabilities into the US–Japan alliance and overall US ‘rebalance’ strategy in East Asia. Japan's main moves in developing an arms transfer strategy have either revolved around US–Japan bilateral projects, or cooperation with US allies and partners. Moreover, Japan's continuing deficiencies in military technology and experience of international collaboration on the government and private sector levels means that its arms transfer strategy remains quite limited in ambition and especially implementation.\ud \ud

This chapter explores the developments in United States (US)–Japan alliance cooperation under the Abe administration and considers their degree of divergence and radicalism from previous trajectories. It also considers the implications of Abe administration policies for the substantive and increasing degree of US–Japan military cooperation and its impact on the region. The chapter argues that Abe has been intent on setting US–Japan alliance cooperation on a radical path that in many ways is beginning to diverge from the post-war course of the Yoshida Doctrine and this regard can even be termed the "Abe Doctrine". It examines the continuing impediments to the full implementation of the "Abe Doctrine". Abe has embarked on a more radical security direction for Japan, but it will not proceed without hindrances due to domestic anxieties about this dramatic shift, residual concerns over entrapment and abandonment, and alliance tensions with the US.

This chapter reevaluates the use of remilitarization in order to understand the contemporary trajectory of Japanese security policy and to demonstrate its strengths. The application of the term “remilitarization” can provide a powerful analytical and theoretical framework to discern the nature and significance of Japan's changing security policy. First, the concept of remilitarization assists in identifying those military components present in all societies, including Japan, that are subject to contestation and thus open the way to substantive change in military security policy. Second, the concept of remilitarization as a dynamic process over time is an important reminder to search for the possibilities of significant change in a society's military stance.

Japan's future trajectory in security policy and the extent of deviation from the post-war course of a constrained military stance have been the source of constant academic and policy debate. Japanese policy-makers have maintained that national security policy has shown no fundamental deviation, and that this can be benchmarked against a range of constant anti-militaristic principles. The advent of BMD, however, poses significant questions over whether Japan is continuing to follow a similar security trajectory. This article examines how BMD has challenged four key anti-militaristic principles—the non-exercise of collective self-defence, the non-military use of space, the ban on the export of weapons technology, and strict civilian control of the military—and uses this assessment to judge how BMD is driving remilitarisation. It concludes that BMD's impact is highly significant in transgressing these anti-militaristic principles and is thus indicating a more remilitarised security path for Japan developing now and in the future.

Japan has been regarded by all mainstream International Relations theories as a status quo power intent on pursuing an immobilist international strategy toward China characterized by hedging rather than any move to active balancing. This paper challenges these assumptions and asks whether Japan will, or indeed already is, moving toward active balancing. The paper does so by reinterpreting the very assumptions of those theoretical perspectives that predict only hedging and by drawing on fresh empirical evidence. It argues that the conditions that are thought to encourage hedging behavior—the predictability of other states’ intentions, the malleability of intentions through engagement, domestic preferences that obviate balancing, and a favorable offense-defense balance—are now deteriorating in the case of Japan’s strategy toward China. Japanese policy-makers over the last decade have experienced an accelerated decline in their confidence to read China’s intentions and to mold these, to the point that China is now regarded as an increasingly malign actor. Japan’s own domestic regime change, paralleling that of China, has released Revisionist forces that favor the cessation of the “underbalancing” of China. Very significantly, Japanese policy-makers’ faith is eroding in the ability to maintain defensive superiority over China, either through its own internal capabilities or the U.S.-Japan alliance. The consequence is that the evidence is now mounting of Japan shifting toward active “soft” and incipient “hard” balancing of China through a policy of the active “encirclement” of China diplomatically, the build-up of Japanese national military capabilities aimed to counter China’s access denial and power projection, and the strengthening of the U.S.-Japan alliance. This shift has become particularly evident following the 2010 trawler incident and the return to power of Prime Minister Abe Shinzō in 2012. The consequences of Japan’s shifting strategy are yet as not entirely clear. Japan may be moving toward a form of “Resentful Realism” that does not add to a new equilibrium to regional security but is actually more destabilizing and poses risk for China and the U.S., especially as Japan’s own security intentions become more opaque. In turn, these conclusions invite a reconsideration of the comfortable theoretical consensus on Japan as an eternal status quo power, and encourage Constructivism, Neoliberalism, but especially Neorealism, to be bolder in their assertions about the probability and degree of radicalism in Japan’s security trajectory.

This essay challenges the dominant negative critiques of the foreign policy of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). The DPJ possesses a coherent grand strategy vision, capable of securing Japan's national interests in an age of multipolarity and centered on a less dependent and more proactive role in the U.S.-Japan alliance, strengthened Sino-Japanese ties, and enhanced East Asian regionalism. However, the DPJ has failed to implement its policy due to domestic and international structural pressures. Consequently, the DPJ is defaulting back into a strategy in the style of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Japanese and U.S. policymakers should recognize the risks of a strategy characterized not by "reluctant realism" but by more destabilizing "resentful realism."

Japan's defense production model is often portrayed as an exemplar of techno-nationalism, but can it serve as a model for China to follow in pursuit of technological military catch-up? Japan in the past has exploited civilian industrial strengths to create a defense production base with footholds in key technologies. However, Japan's defense production model is now displaying structural limits – constrained defense budgets, deficient procurement management, limited international collaboration – with the risks of civilian industry exiting the sector, the loss of even basic competency in military technologies, and the consequent weakening of national security autonomy. Japan's case thus offers emerging comparative lessons for China to study in what to do and not to in pursuing civilian–military integration.

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post-Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan-China-US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a `concert of democracies' involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values-based diplomacy to check the so-called `Beijing consensus'. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.

Japan's reemergence as a "normal" military power has been accelerated by the "super-sizing" of North Korea: a product of the North's extant military threat, multiplied exponentially by its undermining of U.S.-Japan alliance solidarity, views of the North as a domestic "peril," and the North's utilization as a catch-all proxy for remilitarization.

Several years ago, in the wake of 11 September and the lead-up to the Iraq War, when both consensus and conflict among the former Cold War allies came bubbling to the surface, many in the field of ...

New Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has only been in office since late September, but already the outlines of his administration are becoming clearer, both in expected and unexpected directions. Abe’s administration is proving to be conservative and revisionist, and even more so than that of his predecessor Junichirō Koizumi. Abe has certainly moved to improve ties with China and South Korea—Beijing and Seoul the October destinations for his first overseas visits within two weeks of taking power—and thereby to limit the damage wrought by Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine and bilateral wrangling over Japan’s colonial history. However, the general thrust of Abe’s diplomacy is built upon much of the legacy left by Koizumi, and is attempting to shift it on to a yet more pro-active and assertive path.

This article evaluates the nuclear intentions of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the wake of North Korea’s October 2006 nuclear test. main findings Even in the event of an unstoppable North Korean nuclear program, none of the four principal drivers of nuclear proliferation are sufficient or confluent enough to shift Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan toward active nuclear weapons programs: • National security • The national security dilemmas vis-a-vis North Korea are not yet strong enough; Japan and South Korea still see opportunities for diplomatic engagement and conventional deterrence; and—most crucially—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan do yet fear sufficiently the alliance dilemmas of U.S. entrapment or abandonment. • Prestige, identity, and norms • National prestige and identity create temptations for nuclear proliferation, which however are also countered by domestic pressures for conformity with norms and regimes for non-proliferation. • Domestic political economy • Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have only a minimal vested economic interest in nuclear weapons development, and the overall international economic costs militate against nuclear armament. • Technological capability • All three countries may have the eventual technological capacity to develop nuclear weapons, but this capacity would be slow in coming and would constitute a poor substitute for U.S. extended nuclear deterrence. policy implications • Washington still has the capacity to prevent further proliferation by revisiting U.S. policy toward the four principal nuclear drivers. • Of benefit would be for the U.S. to move through diplomatic efforts and the upgrading of its alliances both to control security dilemmas involving North Korea and to reaffirm its extended nuclear guarantees. The U.S. would need, however, to assert deterrence more than pre-emption so as to avoid entrapment and alliance dilemmas. • Also beneficial would be if the U.S. would show a re-adherence both to international and regional expectations for minimizing the role of nuclear weapons in regional security and to norms and regimes of non-proliferation. • Furthermore, of benefit as well would be for the U.S. to continue to provide technological and economic incentives and disincentives to nuclear proliferation.

The chapter provides key background information on the past conceptions and traditions of Japan's security policy in the Cold War and early post-Cold War periods. It outlines Japan's status as something of an 'outlier' in military developments and its development of 'comprehensive' notions of security to respond to both traditional and non-traditional agendas, and thus provides the context and baselines by which to assess the significance of subsequent developments and divergences from Japan's past military trajectory. The declining status of the Yoshida Doctrine as grand strategy has initiated a range of fundamental revisions in Japan's defence principles, operational doctrines and JSDF capabilities. The chapter examines Japan's evolving perceptions of regional and global security challenges in the post-Cold War period, as well as interlinked domestic debates on security, and the specific ways this has begun to feed into Japanese military transformation and degrees of convergence with trends in other advanced industrial states and military power.

Japan has often been dismissed by mainstream international relations and policy discourse as a bit-part actor in Korean Peninsula security affairs. If ascribed any role at all, it is seen as a secondary and submissive actor, generally bending to US strategy and international systemic pressures. This paper argues, however, that Japanese policy towards North Korea is now challenging these international systemic pressures, and threatening divergence with US policy. This is due to the fact that Japan's policy is increasingly driven by domestic political considerations that are rivalling or even superseding international influences in importance. In order to highlight these domestic dynamics, the paper utilizes domestic sanctions theory and a detailed empirical analysis of the Japanese policy-making process with regard to the imposition of sanctions on North Korea. It demonstrates that a "threshold coalition" has now emerged in Japan which is tipping government policy towards sanctions, irrespective of, or even in opposition to, international systemic pressures to desist from such actions. The paper highlights the changing disposition of a pluralistic range of domestic actors away from default engagement to default containment. The consequence of these aggregate domestic pressures is that the Japanese government is finding it progressively harder to converge with US and international strategy towards North Korea. Japan is thus set to augment its influence in Korean Peninsula security affairs by becoming a more obstructive partner in attempts to find an international resolution to the nuclear crisis.

Is Japan re-emerging as a ‘normal’, or even a great, military power in regional and global security affairs? This Adelphi Paper assesses the overall trajectory of Japan's security policy over the last decade, and the impact of a changing Japanese military posture on the stability of East Asia. The paper examines Japan's evolving security debate, set against the background of a shifting international environment and domestic policymaking system; the status of Japan's national military capabilities and constitutional prohibitions; post-Cold War developments in the US-Japan alliance; and Japan's role in multilateral regional security dialogue, UN PKO, and US-led ‘coalitions of the willing’. It concludes that Japan is undoubtedly moving along the trajectory of becoming a more assertive military power, and that this trend has been accelerated post-9/11. Japan is unlikely, though, to channel its military power through greatly different frameworks than at present. Japan will opt for the enhanced, and probably in...

Is Japan re-emerging as a ‘normal’, or even a great, military power in regional and global security affairs? This Adelphi Paper assesses the overall trajectory of Japan's security policy over the last decade, and the impact of a changing Japanese military posture on the stability of East Asia. The paper examines Japan's evolving security debate, set against the background of a shifting international environment and domestic policymaking system; the status of Japan's national military capabilities and constitutional prohibitions; post-Cold War developments in the US-Japan alliance; and Japan's role in multilateral regional security dialogue, UN PKO, and US-led ‘coalitions of the willing’. It concludes that Japan is undoubtedly moving along the trajectory of becoming a more assertive military power, and that this trend has been accelerated post-9/11. Japan is unlikely, though, to channel its military power through greatly different frameworks than at present. Japan will opt for the enhanced, and probably in...

Is Japan re-emerging as a ‘normal’, or even a great, military power in regional and global security affairs? This Adelphi Paper assesses the overall trajectory of Japan's security policy over the last decade, and the impact of a changing Japanese military posture on the stability of East Asia. The paper examines Japan's evolving security debate, set against the background of a shifting international environment and domestic policymaking system; the status of Japan's national military capabilities and constitutional prohibitions; post-Cold War developments in the US-Japan alliance; and Japan's role in multilateral regional security dialogue, UN PKO, and US-led ‘coalitions of the willing’. It concludes that Japan is undoubtedly moving along the trajectory of becoming a more assertive military power, and that this trend has been accelerated post-9/11. Japan is unlikely, though, to channel its military power through greatly different frameworks than at present. Japan will opt for the enhanced, and probably in...

Is Japan re-emerging as a ‘normal’, or even a great, military power in regional and global security affairs? This Adelphi Paper assesses the overall trajectory of Japan's security policy over the last decade, and the impact of a changing Japanese military posture on the stability of East Asia. The paper examines Japan's evolving security debate, set against the background of a shifting international environment and domestic policymaking system; the status of Japan's national military capabilities and constitutional prohibitions; post-Cold War developments in the US-Japan alliance; and Japan's role in multilateral regional security dialogue, UN PKO, and US-led ‘coalitions of the willing’. It concludes that Japan is undoubtedly moving along the trajectory of becoming a more assertive military power, and that this trend has been accelerated post-9/11. Japan is unlikely, though, to channel its military power through greatly different frameworks than at present. Japan will opt for the enhanced, and probably in...

Prime Minister Koizumi's visit to Pyongyang has enabled Japan to dig itself out of an ever deepening and divisive policy rut with regard to North Korea. However, the ability of Japan to exploit the opportunities opened up by the summit still remains indeterminate. So states Christopher Hughes, senior research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick, UK, in the following article. Japan in the past has constructed around itself a framework of international and domestic policy constraints that have impeded and remain a latent impediment on its ability to fully engage North Korea. Hughes suggests that, Koizumi's visit to Pyongyang is a bold policy initiative worthy of praise and one which sets Japanese policy on a surer footing than at any time over the past decade. Nevertheless, Japan could still find itself as the most reluctant and least able of the trilateral partners to fully engage the North due to international constraints, domestic policy splits, ...