ABSTRACT
Japan’s security trajectory, militarization and the military-industrial complex Japan’s post-Cold War proactivity in international security – especially since 11 September and the participation of the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF) in supporting the US-led ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan and Iraq – has reinvigorated the academic and policy debate on the trajectory and implications of Japan’s reemergence as a military power. The current academic and policy debate is dominated by three discourses, with contributions from a fourth, more peripheral, discourse. The first discourse appropriated by specialists in International Relations from a variety of Realist, Constructivist, and Liberal perspectives, has focused on explaining the key drivers for change in Japanese security policy, with particular emphasis on the relative importance of domestic institutions and norms versus international structural.1 The second discourse also found in International Relations has focused on the degrees of continuity or discontinuity in Japan’s so-called ‘grand strategy’, with a split between those who see re-adherence with modifications to the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, and those who see Japan prepared to embark on a more radical course in its international security role alongside the United States.2 The third discourse appropriated by Japanese and US policy makers but also with significant input from the academic community in both states, concentrates on the appropriateness of Japan’s evolving international security role. This discourse tends to emphasize that Japan is becoming a ‘normal’ military power, undertaking ‘international peace cooperation activities’ commensurate, appropriate and proportionate with its status as a leading industrialized democracy, and, indeed, that it should seek to do yet more in supporting the US-Japan alliance, multinational security, and the United Nations (UN). In essence, this discourse argues that Japan’s enhanced military stance is measured and responsible, and poses no concerns for the East Asia region or the international community. Ranged against the mainstream academic and policy discourse, there is a fourth, if increasingly marginalized discourse, which explicitly employs the language of militarization to examine the trajectory and implications of Japan’s security policy. This discourse, employing diverse insights from inter alia
Marxist and Critical Theory and Japanese Peace Research, argues that Japan’s military proactivity is leading inexorably to the recrudescence of militarism under US tutelage, and that this process will lead Japan to turn against the United States and its East Asian neighbours.3 Although the militarization discourse, with some notable exceptions, has often been critiqued or dismissed by the mainstream in recent years as overstated or unscientific, the objective of this chapter is to develop and reapply the militarization discourse in the form of a framework to investigate the means by which it can assist in understanding the causes and ramifications of Japan’s changing security policy.4 For it is arguable that if the militarization framework is applied in sober social science terms, rather than viewed in knee-jerk reaction terms as implying an instant rewind to 1931-45, then it has much to offer in analysing Japan’s contemporary security stance. First, the militarization framework, as elaborated in more detail in the next section, offers a means to overcome the paradigmatic divide in understanding the key drivers of change in Japanese security policy.5 The militarization framework is an inherently eclectic and multidisciplinary one, drawing on insights from Marxism, Liberalism, Constructivism and Realism, and from International Relations, International Political Economy, Economics and Sociology. Hence, whilst it may not offer a parsimonious explanation of change, it does help to combine the most powerful insights of various perspectives and enable a richer set of explanations that detail the full reality of Japan’s security stance. Second, the militarization framework presents a means to engage more effectively in the debate on the continuities and discontinuities of Japan’s security stance. The militarization framework offers a set of objective historical baselines in order to contextualize and calibrate the degree to which any society has shifted its military stance. This should help in adjudicating between those who advocate the second discourse and see Japan holding to or diverging from the ‘Yoshida Doctrine’. Third, and interrelated to the second point, the militarization framework provides a tool of critical analysis to question the dominant orthodoxies and discourses of the policy mainstream. By employing the stark and uncomfortable language of militarization, analysts are forced to question and justify their own assumptions, and consider whether they are really ‘calling a spade a spade’ or are complicit in employing obfuscating language which hinders true understanding of political-military projects. Hence, placing militarization alongside the discourse of ‘normalization’ helps to interrogate more effectively its assumptions about the appropriateness of change in Japan, or whether it might actually be wise to question if Japan’s remilitarization is a cause for concern. This chapter applies the militarization discourse in the following ways. The next section offers a brief definition and explanation of militarization as an analytical framework across a range of features of security policy. This section then focuses in particular on the issue of the military-industrial complex and how this illustrates the dynamics and implications of militarization. The following section then explores the case study of Japan’s defence production and the question of whether Japan is developing a domestic military-industrial complex. The section after it moves on to
consider whether Japan is now fostering a transnational military complex in conjunction with the United States and other developed and developing states. Japan’s defence production – and the question of an emerging militaryindustrial complex – is chosen as the case study to test the militarization framework because it encapsulates and demonstrates well the key contributions of the framework for evaluating change in Japanese security policy. In regard to explaining the key drivers of security change in Japan, the military-industrial complex involves examination of both the domestic and international structural pressures driving security policy, and draws in Marxist, Liberal and Realist perspectives, and the related disciplines of IR and IPE. The issue of the military-industrial complex is further important for measuring the continuities in Japan’s grand strategy. This is because the degree of autonomy in Japanese defence production has often been seen as a barometer of Japanese strategic autonomy vis-à-vis the United States, and the rise of a transnational military complex tasks a re-examination of this autonomy.6 Finally, examination of defence production and the emergence of a militaryindustrial complex pose important questions for the discourse of ‘normalization’. This is because in the post-war period one of the key features of Japanese demiltiarization is thought to have been the undercutting of collaboration between the military and industrial sectors. But if this collaboration is re-emerging, then it clearly poses questions once again about how far Japan’s military stance is ‘normal’ or whether questions should be asked about the risks of the recrudescence in Japan of forms of militarism extant in the past or in other parts of the world. The last section and conclusion of this chapter will then take stock of exactly how the militarization framework assists in analysing the current security trajectory of Japan. It concludes that there are indeed signs of an emerging Japanese military-industrial complex, embedded in the domestic political economy, but also most crucially an emerging transnational complex, driven in particular by the USJapan alliance linkage. In turn, the conclusion argues that these developments do indeed demonstrate that the fourth discourse of militarization needs to be reintroduced more centrally to the study of Japanese security policy in order to achieve a multi-perspective, multidisciplinary approach which supersedes the current paradigmatic roadblock involving the three mainstream discourses, and which enables adjudication in favour of the views that see Japan as shifting away from the Yoshida Doctrine to closer integrated cooperation with the United States; and which demonstrates that the ‘normalization’ discourse needs much closer scrutiny in its claims that Japan’s security stance is appropriate and unthreatening.
