What is a normal Japan?

Japan’s engagement with the question of its identity during the Cold War was somewhat introspective, as it struggled to come to terms with the consequences of its attempts to ‘overcome modernity’ and its defeat in the Pacific War. However, the 1990s saw Japan emerge from beneath its sheltered position under the US umbrella and throw itself into the new post-Cold War international system. Whilst it would certainly be an exaggeration to compare the early 1990s with the mid-1850s, there is some leverage to be gained from the idea that Japan affected genuine shifts in perspective at both times:
from largely domestic issues to concerns about Japan’s identity and role in a new world order. Indeed, in both cases, Japan was pulled out of its interiority by the twin demands of the USA and the imperatives of the emerging international society: in 1854, by Perry’s ‘black ships’ and the imperial trade regimes, and in 1991 by President George Bush’s pressure on Japan to contribute troops to the UN-sanctioned force in Kuwait. In both cases, Japan’s response to this external pressure (or gaiatsu) was conflicted, uncertain, and slow, as decision-makers and the public debated how and whether Japan should take up its new responsibilities on the international stage. In 1991, under tremendous pressure, Japan prevaricated and then sent 13 billion dollars instead of personnel.

Since 1947, Japan’s foreign policy had been tame and low profile, and its orientation towards security issues had been guided by the famous ‘peace clause’ (Article 9) of its constitution, which meant that it had not engaged in any significant military activity and was ostensibly forbidden from doing so.

The US–Japan Security Treaty had effectively insulated Japan from the need to think too seriously about its role in the ‘high politics’ of the international system.

The combination of Japan’s ‘peace constitution’, its US-tutelage, and its so-called ‘nuclear allergy’, which followed on from the horrific experience of being the world’s first and only victims of atomic bombings, fed into a dominant discourse of ‘anti-militarism’, or even pacifism, in the postwar period. On the international stage, Japan had sought to represent itself as an icon of ‘civilian’ or ‘merchant’ power, self-consciously and deliberately eschewing the trappings of military, Great Power status. For Japan’s neighbours, who were understandably wary of a re-armed Japan, this had been good news throughout the Cold War. However, regional criticisms of Japan’s ‘pacifistic’ identity became increasingly prevalent through the 1970s and 1980s, as Japan’s economy bubbled to an astonishing size: pacifism and the nuclear allergy began to look like alibis that sought to transform Japan into a victim of its own history of aggression, hence alleviating the need for it to apologize to its neighbours for its conduct in the first half of the 20th century. 

In other words, the early 1990s brought the question of Japan’s international identity into sharp relief: was Japan really a pacifist polity that consciously chose to avoid military resolutions to international problems, or was this appearance merely a side-effect of the US occupation and then the US–Japan

Security Treaty? An important issue within Japan itself, which was voiced powerfully by the influential politician Ozawa Ichiro, was whether Japan’s apparent anti-militarism actually made it an aberration in the modern world. In his Blueprint for a New Japan (1994), Ozawa famously called on Japan to finally rid itself of its ‘postwar mentality’ and its preoccupation with the legacy of the Pacific War, and to become a ‘normal country’. By this, he meant a country that could take on responsibilities in the international system that were commensurate with its economic status. A popular and emotive example was the claim that Japan, as the second most generous contributor to the United Nations, should have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. In concrete terms, he wanted Japan to revise its 

constitution to enable the overseas despatch of the Self Defence Forces as part of UN peace-keeping operations or other mechanisms of international security. In fact, Ozawa was one of the chief architects of the 1992 International Peace Cooperation Law, which finally made provision for the (limited) participation of the SDFs in UN peace-keeping operations, albeit too late for the first Gulf War. Japan’s first mission under this law was to Cambodia in 1992.

The question of Japan’s international ‘normalcy’ has been pervasive in politics, society, and culture since the early 1990s, and it remains unresolved to this day. For some commentators, the problem can usefully be phrased in terms of Japan’s twin deficits: first, in terms of the absence of ‘normal’ capabilities (that is, a powerful military together with legal mechanisms, and social will, to employ it); and second, in terms of the absence of ‘normal’ legitimacy in the international system (that is, the

apparent failure of Japan to ‘come to terms with its past’ and to apologize to its neighbours).

In fact, Japan’s capability deficit is something of an illusion. It’s Self Defence Forces are amongst the most technologically advanced military forces in the world. Whilst Japan maintains a strict ‘non-nuclear’ armaments policy, it has long had the necessary technology to construct such weapons, and also a space programme with the necessary delivery technologies. It is true that Japan lacks the capability to project an invasion force overseas, but its defensive capacities are second to none, and it

has a range of ‘over the horizon’ technologies that would facilitate pre-emptive strikes at the Asian mainland. In brief, despite the small size of its SDFs (in terms of personnel and percentage of GDP spent, less than 1%), Japan’s ‘non-military’ is one of the most formidable in the Asia region.

In other words, the real sources of Japan’s ‘capability deficit’ are legal and cultural rather than material, and since Prime Minister Koizumi’s enactment of the Anti-Terrorism Specials Measures Law (2001), which enabled the SDFs to be deployed in support of US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq during the second Gulf War, the legal barriers to Japan’s military actions have been severely diluted. Indeed, the discrepancy between Japan’s flexible interpretation of its ‘peace constitution’ and the letter of Article 9

has led many to demand the revision of the constitution itself, to bring it in line with reality. This type of criticism often leads to cynical accusations that Japan’s ostensible ‘pacifism’ has more to do with public relations than substance, and that Japan is clinging to its self-constructed image as a victim of World War II for its own advantage.

This brings us to the question of Japan’s ‘legitimacy deficit’, which has been a central, volatile, and pervasive issue since the 1990s until the present day. In many ways, it boils down to the accusation that Japan and the Japanese are somehow in denial about their own history, or that they have not ‘come to terms with their past’ because of their privileged position under US patronage during the Cold War. Hence, the end of the Cold War provided an occasion for exposing, and hopefully addressing,

this problem, which effectively ties the legitimacy of Japan’s contemporary international role to the question of its ability to examine its responsibility for the Pacific War. Because this issue is so central to the themes of identity and modernity, and because it remains a ‘living issue’ for contemporary Japan,

we should spend some time on it here.