ABSTRACT
Culture, conventionally defined as ‘the values, attitudes, beliefs, orientations, and underlying assumptions prevalent among people in society’ (Huntington 2000: xv), is widely accepted as a key independent variable in the determination and explanation of human behaviour, whether individual or collective. A particular type of culture, such as a national elite security culture, commonly termed subculture, is likewise a critical independent variable in the determination of the behaviour of the particular group in the particular area of individual or collective human activity. It is thus sensible to assume that the Japanese elite’s security culture importantly influences and therefore helps to explain Japanese security policies and practices. In fact, the most interesting and persuasive studies published so far on the subject employ culture, broadly defined, as the key to understanding and explaining Japanese security policy and practice (Katzenstein 1996; Berger 1998; Oros 2008).
