ABSTRACT
Pundits have often ridiculed Japan for having no strategy.1 Nonetheless, Japan has long had a clear, if low-profile strategy. Generally dubbed the Yoshida Doctrine, this strategy consisted of containing the state’s military potential within Article 9 of Japan’s war-renouncing constitution and the US-Japan alliance, depending upon the United States for defence, maintaining a low military profile and reassuring its Asian neighbours that Tokyo would not again emerge as a threat.2 Japan perceived a more autonomous and proactive security stance as more likely to provoke than deter potential threats. Behind these perceptions lay the devastating experience of the Pacific War that produced strong distrust of the state’s ability to control and wisely wield the military, a distrust that in this chapter will henceforth be referred to as anti-militarist distrust of the state, or simply as anti-militarist distrust.3 The Yoshida Doctrine came under pressure in the second half of the 1990s as Japan came to perceive an increasing short-term threat from North Korea and a potential longer-term threat from a rising China. The accumulated weight of these growing threat perceptions along with domestic political reform and realignment set the stage for a significant shift in grand strategy by 2001. With Junichiro Koizumi’s accession to the premiership Japan adopted a more proactive balancing strategy, a strategy that will be referred to in this chapter as the Koizumi Doctrine. The main characteristics of the Koizumi Doctrine were tighter alliance cooperation and integration with the United States, including overseas deployments in support of global US military operations, proactive responses to missile and small-scale territorial threats, combined with a deemphasizing of reassurance and a greater and more direct political assertion of Japan’s national interests vis-à-vis Asian neighbours, and a push for ‘normalizing’ Japan’s security institutions. This last point ultimately entailed reforming Article 9 of Japan’s war-renouncing Constitution. The fundamental outlines of the Koizumi Doctrine continued under his first successor, Shinzo Abe. Nonetheless, an accumulation of domestic and regional political challenges, culminating in the LDP’s historic defeat in the July 2007 Upper House elections and Abe’s subsequent resignation, has caused important aspects of the Koizumi Doctrine to collapse. Most important, Japan is now moving away from tightening its alliance with the United States, and especially
from supporting US military operations overseas. In its wake we have seen a partial return to Yoshida Doctrine policies in some areas and a continuation of Koizumi Doctrine policies in a few areas. In particular, Japan appears to have returned to its previous emphasis on reassuring Asian states, starting with China, about its intentions. On the other hand, Japan continues to forge ahead with missile defence. Aspects of Japan’s missile defence policy ironically involve Japan distancing itself further from the United States, such as the decision to permit the acquisition of military-quality spy satellites with missile detection capabilities, a development not welcomed by Washington. This step appears to signal a desire to have greater control over homeland defence and how to respond to threats from North Korea and China. These changes in grand strategy appear to reflect a calculation that overseas missions in support of American forces risk entrapment in conflicts not in Japan’s interest more than they act as insurance against abandonment by the United States. Overseas deployments that smack of involvement in military operations also face significant public opposition and may drain away resources better concentrated on homeland defence. Overall, the strategy emerging since late 2007 can best be described as defensive realist, with an emphasis on strengthening territorial defence and a retreat from overseas commitments. It is also a strategy that more closely resembles the Yoshida Doctrine than the Koizumi Doctrine.
