ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what emerged as a main theme in the normal nation discourse in the 2000s: acting responsibly on the international stage. It demonstrates how the normal nation discourse underlined that an alleged lack of responsibility was one of the major factors that made postwar Japan abnormal. The normal nation discourse promised to fill this lack. The chapter thus makes the argument that the term ‘responsibility’ became a key marker by which to differentiate the normality of Japan as envisioned by the normal nation discourse from the abnormality of Japan as espoused by the Yoshida Doctrine discourse. Japan’s radically different responses to the 1990–1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq were lauded as proof that the country had finally overcome its past abnormality and become a responsible member of the international community.
The first half of the chapter shows how Japan’s newfound responsibility was differentiated in the temporal dimension, where the irresponsibility of the postwar past signified otherness. The second half demonstrates that differentiation also took place in the spatial dimension, where the irresponsibility of North Korea and China augmented Japan’s sense of acting responsibly in the world. Japanese responsibility—and by extension its normalcy—were thus negotiated and constructed through comparisons on both the temporal and the spatial axes. The chapter roughly spans the first decade of the twenty-first century and most of the material is derived from the 2004 Diet debates of the Budget Committee.
