ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the emergence in the 1980s of the normal nation discourse under the premiership of Nakasone Yasuhiro. It argues that the rapid increase in Soviet armaments in East Asia constituted a dislocation for the dominant Yoshida Doctrine discourse. The appearance of an increased Soviet threat despite Japan’s peaceful behavior was at odds with the underlying logic of the Yoshida Doctrine discourse that regional peace and stability were dependent on Japan’s own peacefulness. This discursive incongruence opened up the political space for the normal nation discourse. It allowed the discourse to claim that the Soviet threat had emerged due to postwar Japan’s weakness and docility, which had encouraged Soviet aspirations for military hegemony in the region. The normal nation thus introduced a new temporal other: ‘weak’ and ‘abnormal’ postwar Japan. It was against this constitutive outside that the normal nation discourse formulated its vision of a ‘normal’ Japan.

This chapter roughly spans the 1980s and the empirical material was mainly collected from the 1986 debates of the Diet Budget Committee.