ABSTRACT

The overall aim of this book is to examine the evolution of the meaning of the Soviet Union and Russia for Japan during the six decades that have passed since the end of World War II. This work further represents a sincere effort to overcome the “model testing” predicament of International Relations (IR) scholarship, in which a theoretical “monologue of instructions” (Kratochwil 2000: 75) precedes the empirical study, which, in turn, is devoted to arguing the usefulness or, alternatively, the fallacious nature, of the theoretical model in question. Theory-free inquiry is obviously impossible. The mere fact that this research focuses on Japan and Russia, and not, say, on relations between Japan’s Niigata Province and the Russian Maritime Province, in itself carries a number of crucial assumptions about the nature of international relations. Propelled by the desire to go beyond theoretical model testing, driven both by the general trend in IR scholarship as well as by the absence of a reflective account of Japan’s relations with Russia, I decided to incorporate the notion of identity into the project. As such, the need for a certain theoretical foundation that would guide but at the same time also limit this inquiry seemed obvious. This study, or my “archive” as some choose to define their ontological and epistemological premises, is located within the post-structural strand of what can be defined as the constructionist or constructivist school of International Relations. As a justification for compromising my initial ambition not to engage in theoretical model testing and to undertake certain self-imposed limitations, I can only state that the choice of this particular analytical framework was not made a priori of the actual empirical work, but only after conducting an extensive survey of primary and secondary sources on Japan’s relations with Russia. An outline of the analytical framework that underlines this case study will be provided in the following section. Importantly, I do not claim exclusive validity or objectivity for this approach. It is my belief, though, that the framework outlined below enables the work to overcome a number of important limitations visible in current scholarship on Japan’s identity and foreign policy, which will also be noted below.