Japan's 'resentful realism' and balancing China's rise

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.