ABSTRACT
As a country that had been defeated in World War II, Japan came to view reform of the UN as a kind of responsibility and destiny, and a permanent seat at the UN Security Council (UNSC) was the ultimate goal. The first Gulf War made it clear that the previously economics-based posture of Japan's foreign policy, characterized by the Yoshida Doctrine, was no longer viable to maintain the respect of and exert influence in the international community. This chapter reviews Japan's diplomatic campaign for a permanent seat on the UNSC during the postwar as a case study of Japan's strategic adjustment to a changing international security environment and to find a way to effectively exert its influence in international politics. Japanese politics in the 1990s ran through a very unstable period after the end of the 1955 political system, in which the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) had dominated government since 1955, with frequent changes in party alignments.
