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BOOK REVIEWS
Richard J. Samuels, Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia. Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press, 2007. 277 pp. ISBN: 9780801446122
Reviewed by Daniel A. Métraux
For the past six decades the United States has assumed primary responsibility for the defense of Japan, but during the last decade American power in East Asia has been on the decline while in Tokyo a group of revisionist politicians who want Japan to become a “normal” military power capable of charting its own military course has come to power. These recent developments are the consequence of substantial alignment changes in Japanese politics and a major shift in the way many Japanese regard Article 9 of their constitution, the so-called “peace-clause” written into the document by the United States during its occupation of Japan after World War II.
Richard J. Samuels, Ford International Professor of political Science at M.I.T., has written a substantial study of the stunning political and strategic changes occurring in the Japan, Korea and China theatre as Japan is rapidly shifting gears and assuming greater responsibility for its own defense. His 2007 book, Securing Japan, focuses on the role Article 9 has played in Japanese politics since around 1950 and how conservative forces in Japan are today seeking to eradicate the article entirely.
Article Nine of the 1947 Constitution gives Japan a national identity closely identified with peace and non-proliferation. When the 1954 Japan Self Defense Establishment Law came into effect, the Japanese government interpreted the Article to mean that as a sovereign nation Japan has the right of self-defense and that is allowed an infrastructure for homeland security. This interpretation specified that Japan could keep a Self-Defense military force (SDF), that it could respond with “minimum necessary force” if invaded, but it could not send forces abroad and could not participate in any collective defense arrangements. This interpretation limited the size of Japan’s postwar military and it limited the use of force to self-defense. In other words, Japan could not maintain the capacity to conduct full scale “modern warfare” and could not assist allied nations like the United States under attack. This proscription on collective defense even implied that Japan could not assist an American warship that came under attack while defending Japan.
The fact that Article 9 has never been changed revolves around the fact that any effort to amend the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in each house of the national Diet and a majority of voters in a national referendum. For the first five decades of the postwar era progressive political parties led by the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) controlled over a third of the seats in both houses of the Diet, thus killing any constitutional reform that they might oppose. Another inhibiting factor was the existence of three political blocs two of which had enough power to block reform of Article Nine. Samuels identifies three blocs with their own distinct views on Article Nine: The antimainstream, the mainstream, and the pacifists.
Samuels’ antimainstream group consists of a conservative grouping of politicians within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who built a strong alliance with various industrialists and other conservative groups in Japanese society. “They favored a combination of rearmament and conventional alliances. To achieve these ends, they called for revision of the constitution’s antiwar Article 9, argued that Japan should rebuild its military capabilities, and sought a reciprocal security commitment with the United States as a step toward their holy grail of ‘autonomous defense.’”
Samuels describes the mainstream faction as a group of pragmatic conservative LDP politicians and their allies led by postwar Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru. These “liberal internationalists” held the view that “economic success and technological autonomy were the prerequisites of national security, and that an alliance with the world’s ascendant power was the best means to buy time until the former could be achieved. They rejected military spending in favor of a broader plan for state-led development of the private sector.” These pragmatists dominated Japanese government during the period when the three pillars of Japan’s postwar security apparatus were established: Article Nine, the Self-Defense Forces, and the U.S. Japan Security Treaty. Their power during the first half-century of the postwar era beat back attempts by the revisionists to change the direction of Article 9.
The “YoshidaSchool” stressed that the foundations of national security rested with economic success and technological autonomy. The U.S., they noted, wanted very much to use Japan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” and that close ties with Washington would encourage a great deal of economic development. If the nation returned to substantial economic prosperity, the day might come when further investment in military preparedness might be encouraged without doing anything substantial to alter Article Nine.
During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, most Japanese favored the views of this faction. Samuels correctly states that public attitudes favored a passive stance over an active stance with a policy of alignment with the United States over a policy of equidistance between the United States and the Soviet Union, political dependence over a policy of autonomy, and minimal rather than extensive military spending. The public favored economic strength, peaceful diplomacy, and a low-key consensus approach. Samuels notes that many of these same feelings persist, even today, although a higher number favor some form of revision for Article Nine.
The third group consisted of intellectuals, labor activists, and leftist politicians who viewed Japan as a “peace nation” and strongly opposed the use of organized violence. As strong supporters of Article Nine and opponents of major rearmament and the US-Japan Security Treaty, they sought a doctrine of “unarmed neutrality.” “These folks did not trust Japan with a full military capability, preferring instead to rely on international public opinion, diplomacy, and passive resistance to counter security threats.” They greatly expanded their grassroots networks during the 1950s and became a substantial political and economic force by 1960. Leftist parties led by the Socialists had considerable success from the 1950s to the 1990s. However, because the Socialist party has virtually disappeared as a viable political force since the 1990s, the political clout of this third group has been severely diminished.
The significant strength of each of these factions kept any change concerning Article 9 from occurring. The mainstream faction working in an informal alliance with the Leftists effectively preserved the integrity of Yoshida’s goals long after he himself was dead, but in the 1990s the dynamic began to changeStung by swift international criticism of Japan’s failure to provide anything more than money to support the United States and its allies in the Gulf War of 1991, public support to deploy minesweepers to the Persian Gulf soared. Revisionists, eying this change in public sentiment, criticized Article Nine as a major obstacle to “international cooperation” and a cause of significant embarrassment. They scored well in 1992 when the Diet passed the Peace Keeping Operations (PKO) bill allowing SDF participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations.
Step-by-step throughout the 1990s and into the new century, Japan began to face new security challenges that enhanced public support for stronger military and stronger military capabilities to defend the nation. The balance of power within the LDP also began to shift markedly as the pragmatists slowly but surely began a noticeable decline. Today revisionist leaders who strongly champion a stronger role for Japan in international affairs dominate the party and are pushing strongly for revision of Article 9 so that Japan might become a “normal” power once more.
Although Article 9 itself remains unchanged today, Samuels indicates that Japan nonetheless has made substantive moves to expand Japan’s defense capacity and responsibilities. Japanese forces join peace-keeping operations throughout the world, patrol sea lanes far from Japan’s shores, participated briefly in Iraq and refuel American ships in the Indian Ocean. In fact, if not by law, Japan’s revisionist politicians are slowly and deliberately transforming Japan into a “normal” political power. What these changes mean for the rest of Asia and China in particular remain to be seen.
Samuels’ Securing Japan” is a cogent, well written and very well researched study that very clearly articulates the many changes in Japanese defense policy that have occurred since 1950. In a more general sense this work is an analysis of Japan’s gradual evolution from a badly defeated nation in 1945 to its full recovery as a modern great power. I would strongly recommend that every American policy maker, journalist and scholar working on contemporary Japanese affairs read this volume with great care.
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Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2007. 372 pp. ISBN: 0-8047-0040-0
Reviewed by Daniel A. Métraux
Takeshi Matsuda’s Soft Power and Its Perils: U.S. Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan offers an in-depth examination of the cultural aspects of Japanese-American relations from the inception of the American Occupation in 1945 through the late 1950s. The U.S. Occupation is often portrayed as a great success story -- Japan became an avowedly democratic and prosperous nation with a strong pacifist bent. Professor Matsuda, however, finds at least some fault with this glowing picture, strongly asserting that the highly paternalistic cultural diplomacy of the Americans created a sense of permanent dependency on the part of the Japanese. He finds that while Japan proudly boasts the elegant trappings of electoral democracy, the country itself remains highly elitist and submissive due in part to American efforts to reinforce the domestic importance of intellectual elites.
Matsuda argues that any comprehensive foreign policy is shaped by three legs--political, economic and cultural. These three elements were strongly emphasized during the Occupation, but with mixed results. The cultural or “soft” aspects of American policy left a mixed legacy -- dynamic exchange programs and enduring friendships represent the positive side of the picture. Matsuda notes the enduring importance of International House in Tokyo as the “headquarters for cultural interchange between Japan and the rest of the world.” (137) “Cultural corrosion” and psychological and structural dependency on the part of the Japanese represent the downside of these policies.
The United States made a concerted effort to develop a genuine “two-way street” that would encourage the flow of cultural ideas and exchanges in both directions, but as historian John Dower notes in the foreword, “In a relationship of such glaring inequality and disparity of power, however, this was easier said than done. The two-lane street amounted to a multilane highway on the U.S. side and single lane in the other…. Certainly in American eyes, the United States was -- and still remains, more a half century later -- defeated Japan’s teacher and preacher, as well as supreme military commander…. More damning yet…, Matsuda observes that American policymakers and cultural emissaries have never abandoned their early postwar assumption of moral, cultural and intellectual superiority; and the Japanese elites whom the United States has so carefully cultivated, in turn, have rarely failed to acquiesce to such cultural hegemony.” (xiv+xvi) Matsuda sadly recounts how an abiding psychology of dependence on the U.S. continues to grip Japan, but that this “inhibiting psychological malady” is more a Japanese than American problem.
The American presence in Japan brought about an explosion of Japanese studies in the United States and American Studies in Japan which has built strong bonds between the two nations. A critical American Occupation goal was to democratize intellectual and university life in Japan by opening a whole slew of new universities, but this project failed to get off the ground. Instead, by working with old school Japanese bureaucratic leaders and by emphasizing the importance of the major universities of prewar Japan, the U.S. strongly encouraged the reemergence of a cultural and intellectual elite in Japan. Matsuda is very critical of Japanese scholars who live in their proverbial ivory towers who while fostering their own work contribute very little to the welfare of society and, most damningly, fail to openly question or criticize government programs and policies. Japanese intellectuals are said to be simultaneously elitist and submissive. This problem, Matsuda notes, represents one of the key failings of attempts to build constructive democracy in Japan.
“The [prewar] Japanese system of academic clique and inbreeding was left virtually intact…. U.S. soft power facilitated and begot the breeding of intellectual weaklings. The Japanese elite who had been nurtured to become pro-American gained ever greater power and influence in the postwar Japanese society. The Japanese bureaucracy, too, actually attained greater authority than it had possessed at the height of mobilization for war…. And yet the postwar Japanese elite were pathetically weak before authority and lamentably deficient in thought and behavior.” (248) Sadly, these developments have led to a weak elitist form of democracy in Japan that prevails even today.
Matsuda’s commentary on the inbreeding and ivory tower aspects of Japanese university life is very much on target. When I taught at Doshisha Women’s College in 1999-2000, I was amazed to find that most of the core professors were graduates of DoshishaUniversity. Only a small handful of professors had any involvement in non-Doshisha activities of any kind. While a good number of professors at MaryBaldwinCollege in Virginia, my home base, hold local political office and are actively involved in community affairs, such is not the case with a vast majority of Doshisha professors. When I tried to submit an article to a Doshisha-based scholarly journal, I was told that only full-time Doshisha professors could submit articles. I very rarely heard any discussions on politics in Japan unless I tried to start one.
Although the Iraq War is not a core topic of this book, Matsuda severely criticizes the Bush Administration’s efforts to compare its invasion of Iraq in 2003 with the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II. Matsuda notes that members of the Bush team claimed that American soft and hard power permanently shaped the future of these two nations and that their goal was to apply the same methodology to Iraq to create a peaceful and democratic society there. Matsuda, however, warns that the occupation of Japan is very different from that of Iraq because the United States approached Japan with a genuine interest in understanding and appreciating Japanese history and culture. While the Americans did indeed approach the Japanese with a deep form of cultural imperialism, the U.S. had for several years prepared itself with a large reservoir of knowledge concerning the interaction of American and Japanese cultures. “In contrast to the current situation in Iraq, the U.S occupation of Japan was a democratic experiment supported by American soft power, as well as hard power…U.S. preparation for the occupation of Japan began immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—that is, four years before the actual occupation of the country.” In addition, “intergovernmental agencies in Washington also spent a great deal of effort defining the general objectives of the occupation of Japan and formulating programs need to meet the specific objectives of the United States.” (2)
Matsuda’s Soft Power is a superb study not only of the history of Japanese-American relations in the postwar era, but also the failure of Japan to develop a strong foundation for its democratic state. Matsuda offers a harsh but very necessary critique of Japanese intelligencia, universities, and the lack of critical thinking in the nation’s educational and political systems. American political leaders will find a very comprehensive overview of the strengths and weaknesses of American “soft power” which I studied with care might help the U.S. avoid another catastrophe like Iraq. Matsuda’s writing is clear, his array of sources profound, and his analyses are well developed. Soft Power is one of the best studies ever done on postwar Japan.
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Madeleine Yue Dong._Republican Beijing: The City and its Histories. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003. x + 400 pp. illustration, maps, note, bibliography, index. $50 (hardcover). ISBN: 0520230507
Reviewed By: Yuxin Ma
Madeleine Yue Dong’s Republican Beijing captured the transformations of Beijing from China’s imperial capital, to the capital of the Republic, to a city of itself which was integrated into the modern industrial world market in the 1910s-30s. A major contribution of this book is that Dong rejects the dichotomies of tradition / modernity, of past / present, and of East / West, arguing for the centrality of the past, of history, of memory, even of nostalgia in the modernizing and self-consciously modern city. In the three parts of the book, Dong studies the transformation of the city’s spatial order, the material life of the city’s inhabitants, and cultural representations of the city in the Republican period.