Abstract
Over the past decade, Japan has moved toward greatly enhancing its regional security role within the framework of the U.S.-Japan security treaty.1 Japans provision of logistical support to U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan is one important, concrete reflection of this trend, and provides a welcome contrast to Japanese inaction during the Gulf campaign a decade earlier.2 Japans willingness to assume such a role gready strengthens the U.S. ability to maintain a stabilizing presence in Asia at a price that is acceptable to the American public. More importantly, it removes one of the main sources of tension in the U.S.-Japan alliance, namely the charge that Japan is a free rider on an international security order paid for largely with American money and defended with the lives of American men and women.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For an excellent overview of this shift in Japanese strategy, see Michael Green, Japans Reluctant Realism: Foreign Policy Changes in a Era of Uncertain Power (New York: St. Martins Press, 2001).
See Thomas Christensen, “China, the U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Security Dilemma in East Asia,” International Security 23:4 (Spring 1999). See also Gerrit W Gong, ed., Remembering and Forgetting: The Legacy of War and Peace in East Asia (Washington, DC: CSIS, 1996).
These two types of patterns are reflective of two different views of how political cultures function. For a discussion of the theoretical lineage of these different schools, see David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Scholars studying the process of reconciliation in post-civil war societies similarly stress the importance of both top-down and bottom-up approaches.
See John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: The United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997).
For instance, when Yugoslavia disintegrated in the late 1980s, long-suppressed memories of the brutal conflict between Albanians, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes during World War II helped fuel a new round of violence that cost over 200,000 lives in the 1990s. Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, revised edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1997).
For a classic analysis of this type of conflict mechanism, see Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil. For a detailed and nuanced discussion of the origins of ethnic conflict, see Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), chapters 3–5.
Myron Weiner has labeled this pattern “the Macedonian Syndrome.” See Myron, Weiner, “The Macedonian Syndrome: An Historical Model of International Relations and Political Development,” World Politics 23:1 (1970). For a brilliant discussion of this process, see Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
For instance, Thomas Christiansen has argued that Mao Zedong used the sense of threat from the United States and Taiwan to mobilize the Chinese populace for his program of rapid industrialization, The Great Leap Forward. See Thomas Christiansen, Useful Adversaries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
For a particularly clear example of this line of argumentation applied to the case of German Imperialism, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Kim Traynor, trans., The German Empire, 1871–1918 (Anna Arbor, MI: Berg Books, 1985).
See also Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
One should not underestimate, however, how quickly such sentiments can be suppressed. See e.g. John Dowers fascinating study of U.S.-Japan wartime propaganda, War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
For a similar argument regarding the importance of elite reciprocity in achieving reconciliation, see Herbert Kelman, “Transforming the Relationship Between Former Enemies: A Social-Psychological Analysis,” in Robert I. Rotberg, ed., After the Peace: Resistance and Reconciliation (Boulder, Co: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
For discussions of the varieties of reconciliation policies see Lederach, Building Peace in Divided Societies; Joseph Montville, “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History in Political Conflict Resolution” and Louis Kriesburg, “Paths to Varieties of Intercommunal Reconciliation,” both in Ho-won Jeong, ed., Conflict Resolution Dynamics (Aldershot: Ashgate 1999); and
Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998).
The failure of the Manila Pact and the SEATO alliance provides an excellent illustration of these problems. See Leszek Buszynski, SEATO: Failure of an Alliance Strategy (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983).
For an excellent overview, see Takashi Yoshida, “A Battle over History: The Nanjing Massacre in Japan,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
The debates over why Japan chose to carve out an empire are many and complex. For an overview, see W.G. Beasley, Japanese Imperialism, 1919–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). For an account focusing on economic-strategic factors,
see Michael Barnhart, Japan Prepares for Total War: The Search for Economic Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). For a fascinating cultural-ideological account of the dynamics of Japanese imperialism, see
Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
There is considerable debate over the extent of the benefits brought on by Japanese rule. For a balanced overview, see Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
See Michael Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
See George L. Hick, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War (New York: Norton, 1995).
On the Korean link to organized crime see David Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza (New York: Macmillan, 1987).
See Tanaka Hiroshi, Zainichigaikokujin: Ho ̄ no Kabe, Kokoro no Mizo, 2nd edition (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 1995).
For a more detailed analysis of the development of anti-Japanese sentiments in Korea in the early Cold War period, see Cheong Sung-Hwa, The Politics of Anti-Japanese Sentiment in Korea: Japanese-South Korean Relations under American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Westport: Greenwood, 1991).
As related by John Welfield, An Empire in Eclipse: Japan in the Postwar American Alliance System (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 91–93.
See Frank Kowalski, Nihon no Saigumbi (Tokyo: Simul Press, 1969), especially pp. 72–73. Likewise, Michael Green, Japan’s Reluctant Realism, pp. 113–114.
For a recent articulation of this point of view, see Fujioka Katsuo and Izawa Motohiko, “No” to ieru Kyo ̄ kasho e: Shinjitsu no Nikkan Keankeishi (Tokyo: Sho ̄ dansha, 1998).
For an important new study exploring the role of domestic political-interest groups in shaping Japanese views on these issues, see James J. Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). For an analysis focusing on the role of Japanese intellectuals and cultural figures in shaping Japanese views, see
Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War and Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a lively comparison of German and Japanese attitudes, see
Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt (New York: Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 1992).
For a fascinating study of the influence of stereotypes on popular culture in imperial Japan, see Jennifer Ellen Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998).
See Vera Schwarz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Chinese Intellectuals and the legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). A similar moment in the development of Korean national consciousness can be seen in the anticolonial March First Movement of the same year.
See John Welfield, An Empire in Eclipse: Japan in the Postwar American Alliance System (London and Atlantic Heights, NJ: Athlone Press, 1988), especially chapter 5. On Yoshida Shigeru’s attitudes toward the PRC, see
John Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience 1878–1954 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1979).
See Kamanishi Akio, GNP 1% Waku: Bo ̄ eiseisaku no Kensho (Tokyo: Kakugawa, 1986), part II.
See Yin Yan-Jun, Chū nichi Senso ̄ Baisho ̄ Mondai (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobo ̄, 1996), pp. 255–312.
For a brief overview of the controversies that emerged during this period, see Kojima Tomoyuki, Ajia Jidai no Nichu ̄ Kankei (Tokyo: Saimaru Shupankai, 1995), pp. 90–118.
See Willem van Kamenede, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inc. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 381.
For a more thorough discussion of these issues, and a comparison of the Japanese experience with that of the Federal Republic of Germany, see Thomas Berger, “Parallel Pathways to Pluralism?: The Politics of Immigration in Germany and Japan,” in The Japan Association of International Relations, Japan, Asia and the World in the 21st Century (Tokyo: Kokusai Shoin, 1998), pp. 585–607.
One reflection of this trend was the sharp increase in intermarriage between the Japanese and resident Korean populations. Miya Hiroto, 65manjin Zainichicho-senjin (Tokyo: Ko ̄ do, 1977), pp. 65–71.
On the relatively slow evolution of Japanese views regarding its history, see Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no Senso ̄ kan (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995).
For brief overviews of the politics of Japan’s apology campaign of the 1990s, see William Lee Howell, “The Inheritance of War : Japan’s Domestic Political Politics and the Domestic Political Ambitions,” in Gerrit W Gong, ed., Remembering and Forgetting: The Legacy of War and Peace in East Asia (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1996), and Michael Mochizuki, “Dealing with a Militarist Past” (forthcoming), Brookings Institution, (2002). On the political importance of the campaign to the Japanese Socialist Party, see
Asano Atsushi, Renritsu Seiken: Nihon no Seiji 1993 (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 1999), part II, chapter 3.
For a comparison of the Japanese reaction to the two visits, see Wakaiyama Yoshibumi, The Postwar Conservative View of Asia (Tokyo: LTCB Library Foundation, 1998), pp. 256–261; and Michael Green, Japan’s Reluctant Realism, pp. 96–98.
Ronald W. Zweig, German Reparations and the Jewish World: A History of the Claims Conference (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987).
See e.g. Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron (Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2003 G. John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Berger, T. (2003). The Construction of Antagonism: The History Problem in Japan’s Foreign Relations. In: Ikenberry, G.J., Inoguchi, T. (eds) Reinventing the Alliance: U.S.-Japan Security Partnership in an Era of Change. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980199_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980199_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-52733-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8019-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)