ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 argued that the Yoshida Doctrine discourse articulated a vision of the postwar peace state that was principally contrasted to prewar Japan, its temporal Other. This chapter highlights a concrete example of how this temporal othering took place. It makes the argument that one of the most important ways in which postwar Japan has attempted to distinguish itself from prewar Japan can be found in the thinking about ‘hypothetical enemies’ [kasō tekikoku]. The designation of hypothetical enemies constituted a central plank of the defense plans of prewar Japan. In the postwar period, however, this practice came to be seen as one of the reasons why Japan had plunged into an unwinnable war with the USA. Policymakers who adhered to the Yoshida Doctrine triumphantly declared that postwar Japan had discarded this security practice and considered no country to be its hypothetical enemy. Postwar Japan’s ostensibly benign security policy of deterrence was differentiated from the dangerous and aggressive prewar policy of designating hypothetical enemies. However, this separation was contested by the neutralists who argued that postwar Japan under the Liberal Democratic Party was essentially continuing the dangerous security policy of prewar Japan.
The main takeaway from the chapter is that the postwar hypothetical enemy taboo made defense planning extremely cumbersome since Japan Defense Agency officials were not supposed to speculate about—much less openly designate other countries as—hypothetical enemies. Apart from the section on historical background, the empirical analysis in this chapter loosely spans the 1960s. The bulk of the Diet statements are from the Budget Committee debates of 1960.
