Colin Cookman
IR 579 Japanese Foreign Relations
12/07/04

Sheathed Sword:
Military Restraint and Japanese Security Policy


Introduction
On May 3rd, 1947, a new Constitution was passed into law for the nation of Japan. Nominally a product of Japanese origin but in fact created under the principal guidance of American occupation authorities under the leadership of Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur, the new document carried provisions for a dramatic restructuring of the Japanese polity in the aftermath of its defeat by the United States in World War II. Unsatisfied with the hesitant progress being made by the Japanese commission for constitutional reform, MacArthur tasked his deputy Major General Courtney Whitney, head of the Government Affairs section in the occupation authority, with leading the Americans’ revision effort.¹ The new constitution, drawing considerably upon United State’s own as a model, was presented to a Tokyo government that had little choice but to accept.

Though MacArthur’s drafters sought to reshape Japanese society in a number of ways, the clause with the greatest impact on the conduct of Japan’s national security over the follow half-century has been the famous Article 9, the “peace clause”, in which the vanquished Japanese empire foreswore the use of military force as an instrument of national policy.

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.²

While there have been no revisions or amendments to date of any of the original language set down by the Americans, flexibile interpretations began to temper the Article’s seemingly unequivocal language from an early start. Like many other aspects of MacArthur’s progressive reform program, Article 9 has been considerably more successful in the ideal than in actual practice. Although they are never referred to as a military force (gun) in any official statements by the Japanese government, the Self Defense Forces (SDF) of Japan can be considered functionally equivalent in almost all respects; they are also arguably the best funded, equipped, and trained force in Asia outside of the Americans’ own.

Sensistive to this evident departure from Article 9’s prohibitions against rearmament, the Japanese have maintained a strong set of rules on the development of these military capabilities. The Prussian military theorist Clausewitz described war as the “extension of politics by other means”, but in post-war Japan, there has been little evident enthusiasm for extending those means very far. The SDF are heavily circumscribed in their activities, subject to numerous restrictions imposed by the civilian political leadership that extend all the way down to the tactical operations level. Legally speaking, Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen are all considered civilian employees of the Japanese Defense Agency (JDA), and are not entitled to protection under a special military code of justice.³ Any deployment outside Japan’s territorial borders has until only recently been forbidden, and collective security arrangements remain unconstitutional under current interpretations. As their name implies, the SDF are officially intended solely for the purpose of “exclusive self-defense”, and any growth on their part has always been accompanied by a reiteration of these restrictions. This policy of carefully restraining the development of Japanese military power through the use of hadome (brakes) has frequently frustrated American diplomats from the early Cold War era to the present, with what appears to be a bafflingly self-defeating insistence on the part of the Japanese that a more activist military policy on their part would be legally impermissible.

Why has Japan not yet taken the step of becoming, in the words of one nationalist critic, a “normal nation” in regards to its military policies?⁴ What explains the persistence of the hadome and Japan’s reluctance to fully pursue a program of robust rearmament, unfettered by the restrictions of the peace clause? The answer lies in the nature of the Japanese security environment, which has been defined by a promise on the part of the United States to provide for Japan’s defense in exchange for alliance and basing rights for American forces. With its security guaranteed by the American superpower, the Tokyo leadership has been able to follow a strategy, first articulated by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru in the doctrine that bears his name, of keeping its military profile low and directing national energies towards trade and diplomacy. With the hadome firmly in place and the SDF’s role minimized, Japan has been able to avoid entanglement in American global campaigns it shared little interest in, focusing on domestic economic growth and development.

Some scholars alternatively emphasize the degree to which popular anti-military sentiment and a deeply ingrained post-war culture of pacifism have informed Japan’s refusal to fully rearm. Furthermore, the “reactive” character of the Japanese national policymaking apparatus may also account to some degree for the persistence of the hadome restrictions. These normative and structural conditions make any revision of the Yoshida Doctrine prohibitively difficult for Japanese politicians, effectively reinforcing the current consensus behind it, but this paper will make the case that defensive realist calculations offer the central explanation for Japan’s continued restrictions on its military. It does so first by assessing the origins and calculations of Yoshida’s strategy, and then subequently considers the role of the normative and structural conditions in Japan in supporting or constraining it. Then, in light of Japan’s changing post-war security environment and evolving alliance relations with its American benefactor, it assesses the Yoshida Doctrine in modern practice and its implications for Japan’s national security into the future.


The Yoshida Doctrine
The alliance between the United States and Japan has formed the cornerstone of Japanese security for the past 50 years, and it was on this basis that Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru couched his strategy for Japan’s future. With the threatening prospect of Soviet expansionism shaping a new Cold War security order, the United States was desperate to rebuild its former enemy as a bulwark of anti-Communism in East Asia. The post-war American leadership was determined not to retreat from its global forward position upon cessation of hostilities, as it had after the first World War; having occupied a position in Japan, the U.S. was keen to stay on, both militarily and through a political and economic alliance.⁵ Prime Minister Yoshida, for his part, saw opportunity in this need, and determined that Japan’s interest would be best served by some level of American patronage. His solution was a tripartite plan, wherein close alliance with the United States would ensure Japanese security, which precluded the need for anything more than modest rearmament, which in turn allowed for minimal military spending and a focus on economic growth. It was, in Susan Pharr’s phrasing, a “low-cost, low-risk, benefit-maximizing strategy”, defensive in nature and skillfull for the degree to which it exploited American needs for Japan’s gain.⁶

Alliance, as has always historically been the case, carried “inadvertent risks” (makikomare-ron). Dependency upon the United States for Japan’s defense opened up the dangerous possibility that its senior alliance partner would make new demands that would draw the nation into conflicts it would prefer to have nothing to do with.⁷ While the Americans saw themselves in grave competition with the Soviet menace on a global scale, Japan felt comparatively little threat in its position of remove off Asia. Although Yoshida and the rest of his LDP peers strongly opposed communism, they were more acutely concerned with the suppression of its presence in domestic politics than they were combatting it abroad.⁸ Having only recently suffered diastrous defeat in their attempts to carve out a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” on the mainland, the Japanese leadership did not possess any enthusiasm for returning there again under American direction, and considered the risk of any direct invasion of Japan to be low.⁹ As Berger summarizes, “The global stakes in Asia were too low to escalate into full-scale superpower struggles, but the cost of containing communism were dauntingly high. Japan hence was unwilling to commit to direct involvement in violent struggles in which it felt it had little interest.”¹⁰

The already existing hadome restrictions on Japanese rearmament offered the ideal means by which to keep the American’s embrace at the ideal level of remove, and to avoid being smothered under the weight of the superpower. Article 9’s ban on the use of military force was actually Japan’s “Heaven-bestowed good fortune” in the opinion of Yoshida, who advised a young deputy at the time that “‘If the Americans complain, the Constitution gives us a perfect justification. The politicians who want to amend it are fools’”.¹¹ As the United States entered into open war in neighboring Korea, Yoshida became, in Walter LaFeber’s description, “obsessed by the fear that Americans wanted Japanese troops to be used” in that conflict, and was determined to preserve Japanese independence despite his nation’s great reliance on the U.S. for its protection.¹² Japan’s battered economy, its new post-war pacifism, and above all the legal prohibitions of Article 9 made more active participation in American adventures impossible, Yoshida argued.¹³

American statesmen found themselves stymied in the face of this resistance. U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon would soon describe Article 9 as a mistake of the Americans’ own making, but the Japanese would not let up.¹⁴ Although Yoshida was willing to transform the domestic Police Reserve into the Self Defense Forces and increase their number to 110,000 men, he balked at further rearmament. Direct pressure from Nixon and U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to the effect that Japan should increase its share of the defense burden — a request in line with the Eisenhower administration’s “New Look” policies, which sought to reduce costs by scaling down U.S. conventional forces and having local allies step up to fill their roles — ran into heavy opposition from Yoshida and his disciples. The establishment of the JDA and an agreement on mutual security in 1954 had to be further sweetened by $150 million in military aid — the equivalent one quarter of Japanese commodity imports during the 1952-1956 period — and an additional $100 million worth of non-military assistance.¹⁵ Japan was able to extract these extensive concessions by offering crucial basing rights to U.S. military forces; as much as the American Cold Warriors wished for greater participation on Tokyo’s part, they “agreed to defend Japan despite Japan’s own limited contribution because the conflict in the Korean peninsula and the rise of a communist regime in China made Japan the only secure American foothold in Northeast Asia.”¹⁶ Sales of non-military materiel to the American forces fighting in Korea proved pivotal in restarting the engine of Japanese economic growth, but any dispatch of combat personnel or explicitly war-related armaments was regrettably impossible, lest they put Japan on a slippery slope towards entanglement.¹⁷

For the most part, Japan’s contribution of bases on Okinawa and the home islands was sufficient for the Americans for the next two decades, who had little other choice given the untenability of withdrawal from the region; as much as they would have preferred a greater contribution on the part of the SDF towards Cold War operations in East Asia, none was forthcoming. Although Japan revised its Mutual Security Treaty with the U.S. in 1960, codifying the American security guarantee and Japan’s support for bases on its territory, communication between the two militaries was minimal for much of the following two decades, even on issues such as the formal plans for a defense of Japan in the event of its attack.¹⁸ Having recieved a broad guarantee of their security and content that American geostrategic concerns ensured their defense, the Japanese were content for “an alliance in name only” where military matters were concerned.¹⁹ Japanese foreign policy emphasized “omni-directional diplomacy”, maintaing good trading relations with as many parties as possible, and the separation of politics from economics (seikei bunri), in an attempt to minimize potential risks and profit from low-cost American security.²⁰ This “buck-passing strategy”, according to Jennifer Lind, was an attractive solution to Japan’s security needs: fairly secure to begin with, Tokyo was able to set a limit on its contributions through the maintenance of hadome, and effectively transfer costs for its defense to the United States.²¹

Heiwa Kokku and the Reactive State
The Yoshida Doctrine presents a compelling argument for how Japan’s decisions to limit the extent of its rearmament, while seemingly counterintuitive to frustrated American observers, actually coincided aptly with realist expectations of calculated benefit-maximization on the part of the national leadership. It is not, however, the only explanation for the persistence of hadome. Strategies are not formed in an empty vacuum, and normative and structural restraints within the Japanese polity against a more robust military buildup make deviation from the Yoshida consensus prohibitively difficult for his successors.

As Michael Green notes, the Yoshida Doctrine was as much a compromise measure designed to balance amongst disparate interest groups as it was a piece of calculated national security strategy. “Alliance with the United States provided technology transfers, economic assistance, and markets for those conservatives who were concerned primarily with economic recovery. For the hawks, the alliance provided a source of military technology, defense assistance, and external political support for some level of rearmament. For the doves, the alliance provided a cap on that rearmament”.²² It is in many ways a testament to Yoshida’s political craftsmanship that his doctrine both assured Japanese security and paved the way for reconstruction and economic development, while also satisfying all major interests and building a strong consensus behind continued LDP leadership.

As numerous scholars of Japan and many Japanese themselves will attest, widespread popular pacifism is a reality of postwar Japanese political sentiment. Thomas Berger, in a number of works, has described what he terms a pervasive “culture of anti-militarism”, born out of the trauma of World War II, the destruction of Japanese cities under grinding American bombardment, and the shocking power of nuclear war. Berger also distinguishes the Japanese experience from that of another defeated Axis power, Germany, by noting the degree to which the Japanese military as an institution, rather than virulent nationalist ideology, was blamed for the horror of war.²³ The wartime elite in Japan had come to power through campaigns of assassination, subterfuge, and artificial emergencies designed to rally support behind militarist expansion in Asia, reinforcing a sense of victimization on the part of many Japanese, who viewed themselves as helpless in the face of “political forces beyond their control.”²⁴ The fact that Japan launched its war in East Asia to secure the same sorts of imperial priveleges already enjoyed by the Western colonial powers further contributed to a sense of “double-victimization”.²⁵ The result was a deep antipathy for the Japanese military, which was viewed as being

innately inclined to take matters into its own hands, and hostile towards human rights and emocracy. The profound Japanese distrust of its own military has consistently been reflected in the Japanese debate over defense and national security throughout the postwar era. For example, the Japanese have been extraordinarily reluctant to allow their armed forces to engage in military planning for fear that, as in the 1930s, the military might try to engineer an international incident that could drag Japan into a war in Asia.²⁶

This rejection of the military and militarism by the post-war Japanese population and their desire to redefine Japan as a country of peace (heiwa kokku) finds its expression in regular opinion polling that demonstrate an “abiding skepticism”, if not outright hostility, towards the SDF and its military mission.²⁷

Compounding this popular opposition to any substantial expansion of Japan’s military capabilities are the many structural limitations on the development of a more activist defense posture — what Kent Calder has described as the “reactive” character of the Japanese policymaking apparatus.²⁸ On the legislative front, the LDP, which has governed almost uninterrupted for the entirety of Japan’s post-war history, is not an ideological party but rather a coalition of interest groups whose primary shared concern is the furtherance of its collective rule. The party is highly factionalized, and dedicated principally to serving the interests of its domestic constituencies in agriculture, construction, and other powerful industries. The system results in conservative, protectionist foreign and economic policy measures, and offers little incentive for politicians to assume a leading role on more controversial issues of national security policy.²⁹ The “defense tribe” policy caucus within the LDP that concerns itself with the functioning of the JDA is by necessity a cross-factional group, and cannot rely on strong support from faction leaders with more parochial concerns.³⁰

Rather than serving to enforce order among the divisions of the LDP, the Japanese prime minister has generally been “at best a first among equals, forced to coordinate all his policies with faction or coalition partners. In many cases, the prime minister is only a pawn, put in office because his very weakness serves the other leaders’ interests.”³¹ The office is a weak one, constrained in its ability to assert control over the heavily entrenched interests of the bureaucracies, who play the decisive role in determining the composition of the cabinet. Unlike the American system, where the incoming administration selects its own senior secretaries, the Japanese prime minister must rely on ministers seconded by the bureacracies, limiting the range of political appointments and the prospect for any dynamic changes in policy.³² The ability of the Cabinet Intelligence Office (formerly the Cabinet Information Research Office) to coordinate information for the executive’s consumption is limited, leaving him heavily dependent on the ministries, which promote material to his attention in order to advance their own instutional interests.³³

The Japanese Defense Agency itself is disadvantaged and marginalized within the government; civilian control over the military is so absolute that, in the estimation of Peter Katzenstein, absent some form of “domestic political revolution” the development of any “autonomous and powerful military establishment” will remain impossible for the forseeable future.³⁴ As a cabinet-level agency rather than a full-fledged ministry, it remains subordinate to the more powerful Ministries of Finance (MOF), Trade and Industry (MITI) and Foreign Affairs (MOFA), who together exert the greatest control over the direction and implementation of Japanese national security policy.³⁵ Within the JDA itself, top administrators and officials are usually outside transplants from one of the more powerful ministries, limiting opportunities for agency staff to rise within the ranks and develop their own independent power base or institutional esprit de corps. Michael Green suggests that this may in fact be slowly changing, as a new generation of younger and more assertive officials advance through the agency, but to date the conservative senior leadership and the power of the other ministries have prevented the emergence of any strong voice for rearmament.³⁶

Hoisting the Shield
Unfortunately for the disciples of Yoshida Shigeru, Japan’s post-war security climate did not freeze in the early Cold War period of the 1950s and 60s, and its evolution over time has forced Japan to forego some of its former aloofness, weakening the hadome’s hold in order to keep the American alliance bond secure. With the “miracle” of Japan’s post-war growth boom greatly evident by the 1970s, Japanese protestations that economic weakness necessitated minimal militarization were no longer seen as a plausible excuse. At the same time, major shifts in the dynamics of the Cold War forced the Tokyo leadership to reassess the stability of the American promise to defend Japan with only a minimal Japanese contribution in return, the crucial foundation of the Yoshida Doctrine. The American withdrawal from Vietnam and detente with Maoist China raised the possibility that its commitments in Asia was being scaled back; at the same time, the Soviet atomic arsenal had reached threatening new heights, as SS-20 ballistic missiles were deployed to the Siberian far east and the Russians closed on nuclear parity with the United States.³⁷ When compounded with the expansion of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, the dispatch of a military division to the disputed Sakhalin islands, and signs of new Soviet aggression the invasion of Afghanistan, the Japanese homeland and surrounding territorial waters appeared to be under a more direct and compelling threat than had been previously evident.³⁸

The incentive value of merely providing basing rights to American forces in the Japanese islands now seemed a tenuous thing on which to hang Japan’s defense. Abandonment by an ally who begrudgingly provided the first line of Japanese defense now became the chief fear of Japanese leaders, rather than the possibility of entanglement that had bedeviled Yoshida Shigeru. As Berger explains, this “reduced threat of entanglement weakend domestic political opposition to the U.S.-Japan alliance and the japanese defense establishment in general. At the same time, the threat of the Soviet Union could no longer be ignored. Hence Japanese leaders felt prompted to increase and modernize the Self Defense Forces while upgrading military ties with the United States.”³⁹ The 1978 Guidelines on U.S.—Japan Defense Cooperation instituted a real cooperative relationship between the two nations’ militaries for the first time, with the Maritime Self Defense Forces (MSDF) taking part in RIMPAC joint naval exercises together with the US Navy in the waters surrounding Japan and the wider Pacific.⁴⁰ These new ties and the accompanying buildup of Japanese forces were significant, but remained under an Article 9 framework that prohibited Japan from participating in missions unrelated to its own direct defense. The new joint relationship was described as tate-yari — “shield and sword”, where Japan’s rear area defensive support would aid the forward deployment of American forces. The need for cooperation and coordination with the Americans on that mission was recognized by the Japanese leadership, but their reluctance to play a front-line role remained.⁴¹

The “Iraq Shock” and the New Guidelines
This scenario repeated itself in the aftermath of the Cold War, when concerns arose again about Japan’s share of the alliance burden and the American willigness to continue shouldering it. Like many American observers, the Japanese were caught off-guard by the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union, which took with it the chief rationale for America’s Cold War-era global mission. Furthermore, when the George H.W. Bush administration organized a coalition to repel the invasion forces of Saddam Hussein and restore the integrity of the Kuwaiti principality in 1991, Japan failed to report for duty. The stunning success of the American military against the Iraqi army in Operation Desert Storm was no less shocking for the torrent of criticism that was unleashed afterwards towards the Japanese for failing to come to the support of their ally. Efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu Toshiki to provide a contingent of (unarmed, strictly supporting-role) SDF troops to assist in Iraq failed to materialize, and the U.S. House of Representatives responded with a bill demanding Japan take full responsibility for the maintenance of American bases in Japan, rather than splitting the $4.5 billion costs as had historically been the case.⁴² Despite the long history of hadome restrictions, “Japan’s insistence that it was legally unable to use its forces for anything other than the defense of Japan was virtually incomprehensible to the United States”. Had Americans suffered the kind of casualities against the Iraqi Soviet-style army that some commentators had predicted going into the conflict, there was a high possibility that “a backlash against Japan might have wrecked the alliance.”⁴³ Even Japan’s $13 billion contribution to the coalition efforts after the end of major combat operations failed to fully ameliorate the criticisms made by many American public figures over Japan’s “checkbook diplomacy”⁴⁴

These worrisome signs of a fraying alliance were followed almost immediately in 1994 by the North Korean nuclear crisis and later the launch of Taepodong ballistic missiles over Japanese airspace. What had previously been viewed as “the fire on the other shore” (taigan no kagi) now threatened to spread to Japan’s home islands, making Japan’s immediate security environment appear far more dangerous at a time when U.S. protection might no longer be as guaranteed. Still, “the Japan government seemed incapable of offering concrete support” in the event of a military contingency in Korea, infuriating American planners.⁴⁵ A recognition emerged within Japan that the principle relationship on which its national security dependend was under serious strain — “that ‘one-nation pacifism’ was viewed by other nations as ‘selfishness’”.⁴⁶

Faced with the prospect of being forced out from under the American aegis into a security environment that appeared far more threatening than what it faced in 1950, the Japanese leadership opted to shift the balance amongst the three legs of Yoshida’s strategy, accepting an increased military buildup and more active partnership in order to shore up the promise of protection by United States. Yoshida had the luxury of free security, and could cling to hadome in order to preserve his independence; put to the test of abandonment, his successors have been forced to compromise and accept a greater share of Japan’s defense burden. Major shifts in public opinion, reacting to the overwhelmingly negative response to Japan’s contribution of monetary aid alone, backed the dispatch of MSDF minesweepers to the Persian Gulf, albeit safely after the end of combat operations.⁴⁷

As they had in the late Cold War period, Japanese leaders came to the conclusion in the new international environment, a security guarantee from the United States was still worth the increased cost. To that end, they undertook efforts in 1997 to tighten the bonds of alliance, through a revision of the Guidelines for Defense Cooperation between the two countries. The New Guidelines focused particularly on increasing Japan’s supporting role for U.S. operations in areas surrounding Japan (shuhen), in a clear effort to reach an understanding on the Korean threat. While “there was no guarantee that Japan would support the United States in a military emergency,” Berger notes, “Japan’s leaders were determined to at least offer concrete support to the United States in the event of a conflict on the Korean peninsula, both to improve the chances of military success as well as to avoid the threat of abandonment by its principal ally.”⁴⁸ The hadome restrictions on collective security still persisted as a safeguard against unsought conscription into America’s battles, but at the same time, Japan sought to dispel its image as a passive partner by incrementally reducing some limits on the use of military force in support of its ally.

Changing Security, Changing Attittudes
Japanese popular opinion has adapted to the new security environment of the post-Cold War.⁴⁹ That it has been lead, sometimes quite deliberately, by corresponding shifting elite opinions is undeniable, but attitudes on rearmament and constitutional revision have become increasingly permissive to a degree that would not have been possible in the early post-war years. “While still the object of much generalized suspicion, the military as an institution is no longer viewed as a serious threat to democracy”, and applications to join the military services are rising in their number and caliber.⁵⁰ Article 9 itself no longer appears to be held sacred, as 2002 newspaper surveys indicated 57% in support of constitutional revision, and only 29% opposed.⁵¹ Support is even stronger among younger voters and politicians; a full 90% of Diet representatives under the age of 50 polled in 1998 expressed a desire to alter the current constitution.⁵² Though this shift should not be overemphasized, popular perceptions are clearly changing, as may be witnessed in the lack of any major protest over the recent passage of emergency laws (yuji hosei) that authorize the SDF to establish order, evacuate civilians, and clear roads in the event of national emergency.⁵³ The prospect in 1965 that the military might be planning for the implementation of martial law in the case of a Korean contingency — the “Three Arrows Plan”, developed in secret with the U.S. and South Korean militaries — brought an uproar sufficient to topple the government of Eisaku Sato, so great was the fear of a repeat of the contrived contigencies that had provided the Japanese military with the pretext for the invasion of China in the 1930s. The current emergency laws were passed some forty years later with no such controversy.⁵⁴

Though Berger suggests that pacifism is a “hothouse plant” no longer, and has set down deep roots within popular Japanese society, to date these antimilitarist convictions have not faced the ultimate test of being forced out of the warmth of America’s shelter.⁵⁵ Berger notes that “Japan’s anti-militarism in its present form could not survive both a weakening of its alliance with the United States and the emergence of a new regional security threat”. North Korean hostility — as well as rising, potentially belligerent, Chinese regional power — appear to satisfy his second criteria for many Japanese, so that in cases when the alliance appears at risk, Tokyo has consented to increasing its military commitments.⁵⁶ Debate over these decisions was often fierce, but the majority of Japan’s political leadership seems to have reached a consensus (aided, no doubt, by the institutional inertia of the two country’s five-decades long alliance) that the benefits of American protection continue to outweigh the costs of guaranteeing it. In doing so they have surrendered many of the checks against entanglement that Yoshida Shigeru once sought to preserve with the strict institution of the hadome policies, but a changing security environment has made burden-sharing demands unavoidable if the American security guarantee is to be maintained. While departing from the original parameters of Yoshida’s plan, this defensive strategy remains true to its core strategic principles.

Conclusions
Thus we find the Ground Self Defense Forces deployed today in Samawa, Iraq,dispatched there in 2004 by Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro in an effort to avoid a repeat of the first Gulf War crisis by actively pledging Japanese support to American coalition efforts. While an unprecedented departure from previous restrictions on the dispatch of any SDF forces abroad, the troops retain their noncombat status and are surrounded by both hadome and high walls. Legally unable to come to the defense of nearby Dutch peacekeepers, they have been shut inside their base for extended periods, and their presence is primarily a diplomatic token.⁵⁷ While frustrating at the operational level, these restrictions reaffirm the defensive, realist calculations involved in Japanese military strategy, demonstrating that even when breaking taboos of deployment, the Japanese leadership remains careful to avoid a costly entrapment in an American war.

What are the implications of this approach for the future? Japan will likely continue to keep its military posture as low as it can manage, passing as great a portion of that defense burden onto its ally as possible, but will increase its participation and relax restrictions on rearmament if the alliance appears to be on particularly shaky footing. Life under the American aegis has served Japan well over the past half-century, enabling it to avoid costly military buildup while focusing its energies towards economic recovery and burgeoning growth. If the price of relying on the United States for Japan’s defense should eventually become too great for Japan to bear — an conclusion which might be hastened should disaster strike its troops in Iraq and a popular outcry over casualties destablize the Koizumi government — at some point in the future we might expect Japan to diverge from America militarily. Conversely, if the costs of providing for Japan’s own security independent of the U.S. seem too great in the face of a rising Chinese regional power or an aggressive nuclear North Korea, we can expect increased burden-sharing efforts — perhaps even to the point of finally eliminating the strongest break on rearmament and collective security, Article 9 — in order to preserve some of the gains offered by continued alliance with the American superpower.



Footnotes

¹ Lafeber 266
² Constitution of Japan, 1946
³ Library of Congress Country Studies: Japan
⁴ Green 19
⁵ LaFeber 272-3
⁶ Pharr 237
⁷ Pharr 239
⁸ LaFeber 277
⁹ Ibid. 291
¹⁰ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance, 42-3
¹¹ Green 12
¹² LaFeber 289, 299
¹³ Mochizuki 153
¹⁴ LaFeber 298
¹⁵ Ibid. 299
¹⁶ Mochizuki 153
¹⁷ LaFeber 293-4
¹⁸ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 43
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Pharr 241-2
²¹ Lind 102-4
²² Green 11-12
²³ From Sword to Chrysanthemum 131
²⁴ “From Sword to Chrysanthemum” 133
²⁵ Ibid. 135
²⁶ Ibid. 136
²⁷ Katzenstein and Nubuo 102
²⁸ Green 35
²⁹ Green 36; Purrington 17-18
³⁰ Katzenstein and Nobuo 94
³¹ Green 70
³² Katzenstein and Nobuo 93
³³ Green 70
³⁴ Ibid. 86
³⁵ Katzenstein and Nobuo 92
³⁶ Green 64
³⁷ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 43; Mochizuki 157
³⁸ Mochizuki 157
³⁹ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 44
⁴⁰ Smith 77
⁴¹ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 58
⁴² LaFeber 387
⁴³ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 48
⁴⁴ Ibid.
⁴⁵ Ibid.
⁴⁶ Purrington 170
⁴⁷ Purrington 171-2
⁴⁸ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 49
⁴⁹ “Alliance Politics and Japan’s Postwar Culture of Antimilitarism” 199
⁵⁰ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 32
⁵¹ Ibid.
⁵² Green 25
⁵³ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 36
⁵⁴ Smith 77; “Alliance Politics and Japan’s Postwar Culture of Antimilitarism” 196
⁵⁵ “From Sword to Chrysanthemum” 120
⁵⁶ Ibid.
⁵⁷ Redefining Japan & the U.S.—Japan Alliance 1-2; Onishi

Works Cited

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---. “From Sword to Chrysanthemum: Japan’s Culture of Anti-militarism” International Security Vol 17, No. 4 1993: 119-150.

---. Redefining Japan and the U.S.—Japan Alliance. New York: The Japan Society, 2004.

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Purrington, Courtney. “Tokyo’s Policy Responses During the Gulf War and the Impact of the ‘Iraqi Shock’ on Japan.” Pacific Affairs Vol. 65, No. 2 1992: 161-181.

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