APAN

Vol.2 No.4
Spring 2019ISSN 2433-4456

REVIEW

Japan and the Post-World War II
Liberal International Order
U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco
Peace Treaty̶ A Look at the Trump Administration’s
Japan Policies from the Perspective of
Diplomatic History ̶
Michael Schaller

Uncertainty and the Political Construction of
the EU-Japan Diplomatic Dialogue:
The Cold War Years and the New Scenario
Oliviero Frattolillo

Turbulence in the Post-war Order and Issues
in Japanese Diplomacy
Hiroshi Nakanishi

The Balance of Power in Korea, and Japan
Jitsuo Tsuchiyama

The Free Trade System Facing
the Threat of Collapse
Shujiro Urata
THE J A P A N
I NS T I T UTE O F
IN T E R NA TI O NA L
A F FA I R S

Report: History, Psychology, andthe Rule of Law in East Asian Security
Lecture by Professor David Welch

The Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), founded in 1959, is an independent nonpartisan
policy thinktank specializing in foreign affairs and security policy. On top of a wide range of
research programs, the institute promotes dialogues and joint studies with other institutions
and experts at home and abroad, and makes foreign policy proposals to the government, anddisseminates information on international relations to the public. The institute, together with alarge network of affiliated scholars, aims to serve as an indispensable resource on international
affairs in a complex world.

Publisher : Kenichiro Sasae, President, JIIA
Editor in Chief : Shu Nakagawa, Director of Research Coordination, JIIAThe opinions expressed in the articles in Japan Review do not necessarily reflect the opinions
or positions of the Japan Institute of International Affairs. No article or any part thereof may be
reproduced without the express permission of JIIA.

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ISSN 2433-4456

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Designed and Printed in Japan by Taiheisha.Ltd

APAN

Vol.2 No.4
Spring 2019

REVIEW

Japan and the Post-World War II
Liberal International Order

1 U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco Peace Treaty
— A Look at the Trump Administration’s Japan Policies from the
Perspective of Diplomatic History — ��������������������03

Michael Schaller
Michael Schaller is Regents Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arizona, where
he taught from 1974-2017. He received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Michigan. He
has published several books on U.S. relations with East Asia, including: The U.S. Crusade in
China, 1938-1945; The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia;
Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General; Altered States: The United States and Japan since
the Occupation. The latter three books have been translated into Japanese.

2 Uncertainty and the Political Construction of the EU-Japan
Diplomatic Dialogue: The Cold War Years and the New Scenario������12

Oliviero Frattolillo
Oliviero Frattolillo is Associate Professor at the Department of Politics of Roma Tre University
where he teaches Political and Diplomatic History of East Asia. In 2004 he earned a Ph.D. in
Asian Studies from “LʼOrientale” University of Napoli, and was Guest Researcher at Okinawa
University of Arts. Visiting Scholar at the Department of Law of Keio University (Tokyo) as
Japan Foundation Fellow and at the Department of Histor y of the Pennsylvania University(Philadelphia), he is currently Research Associate at the EHESS in Paris and co-editor of thebook series New Directions in East Asian History for Palgrave MacMillan.

3 Turbulence in the Post-war Order and Issues in Japanese Diplomacy ����19

Hiroshi Nakanishi
Hiroshi Nakanishi is a professor in the Law Department at Kyoto University. His major interests
are historical development of international relations in the Asia-Pacific in the 20th Century andJapanese foreign and security policy. His major publications include Kokusaiseiji-toha Nanika(Chuokoronshinsha, 2003, Yomiuri-Yoshino Sakuzo prize winner), Kokusaiseijigaku (Yuhikaku,
2013, co-written with Atsushi Ishida and Masayuki Tadokoro).

1

4 The Balance of Power in Korea, and Japan�����������������29

Jitsuo Tsuchiyama
Jitsuo Tsuchiyama is professor emeritus of Aoyama Gakuin University. He has been Presidentof Japan Association for International Security since 2018. He was professor of international
politics at the School of International Politics, Economics and Communication at Aoyama
Gakuin University in 1993-2019, and he was Vice President of Aoyama Gakuin University in
2007-2011. He was a visiting scholar at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard
University in 1993-1994. He received BL from Aoyama Gakuin University in 1973, MA from
George Washington University in 1979, and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College
Park in 1984. His publications include International Politics of Security: Hubris and Anxiety(Yuhikaku, 2014), Japan in International Politics: The Foreign Policy of an Adaptive State (Lynne
Rienner Publishers, 2007), and Institutionalizing Northeast Asia: Regional Steps Towards Global
Governance (United Nations University Press, 2008).

5 The Free Trade System Facing the Threat of Collapse �����������34

Shujiro Urata
Shujiro Urata is Professor of Economics at Graduate School Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda
University, Faculty Fellow at the Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI),
Research Fellow at the Japanese Centre for Economic Research (JCER), Senior Research
Advisor, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA). Professor Urata
received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. He specializes in international
economics and has published a number of books and articles on international economic issues.
His recent co-edited books include Free Trade Agreements in the Asia-Pacific (World Scientific,
2010), Economic Consequences of Globalization: Evidence from East Asia (Routledge, 2012),
Emerging Global Trade Governance (Routledge, 2018).

6 Report: History, Psychology, and the Rule of Law in East Asian Security��38
Lecture by Professor David Welch

2

Michael Schaller

U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco Peace Treaty— A Look at the Trump Administration’s Japan Policies fromthe Perspective of Diplomatic History —*Michael Schaller**

Abstract
After being defeated in 1945 and occupied, Japan regained its sovereignty in 1952 and went
on to achieving spectacular economic growth. This presentation looks at how the UnitedStates viewed Japan after World War II as communism spread in East Asia, and how thestatus of Japan in the eyes of the U.S. evolved. It also looks at the significance of the UnitedStates for Japan that emerged exhausted after losing a war and was desperate to regain its
sovereignty. The current administrationʼs Japan policies in the context of diplomatic historyis also discussed, building upon the anaylysis on the evolution of the U.S.-Japan relationshipduring and after the Cold War.

I

hope I donʼt disappoint you because Iʼm an historian, and historians predict the past.
We are quite unreliable at predicting the future, so we try to stick to predicting the past
which, to be honest, can also be very challenging! But Iʼll try to explain some of the links
I see between the past and the present. Less than a month after Japanʼs surrender in the
Pacific War, in September 1945, a young American diplomat, John Emerson, moved into his new
Tokyo office that had been requisitioned from the Mitsui Corporation. When he arrived, a Mitsui
executive was clearing out his desk and as he left, he pointed to a map on the wall of the CoProsperity Sphere and said to Emerson “There it is...We tried. See what you can do with it!” A
shaken Emerson recalled that suddenly, the whole burden of American foreign policy in Asia hit
him in the stomach. What was America going to do with it? During the next several decades andin some ways continuing today, that question remains relevant. Where would an American-allied
Japan fit into post-World War II Asia?
Five years after Emersonʼs Tokyo encounter, a leading American diplomat, George Kennan,
the so-called Father of Containment, pondered the same question at a meeting of State
Department officials. How, he asked, in the wake of Chinaʼs communist revolution, could Japan
overcome its “terrific problem?” How was it going to secure viable raw materials and markets
unless it once “again re-opened some sort of empire to the south?” With China “lost,” another
diplomat agreed, the United States had to devise a way to “get Japan into, Iʼm afraid,” he said, “theold Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
Another five years later on, in 1954, with Japanʼs economic recovery then underway, American
officials continued to insist that Southeast Asia, not the West, must become Japanʼs primar yeconomic partner. But theory and practice had already begun to clash. In 1954, the American*

This is an edited transcript of a lecture made by the author at an event co-organized by JIIA and Kyoto
University Graduate School of Law on October 16, 2018.

** Michael Schaller is Regents Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Arizona.

3
Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco Peace Treaty— A Look at the Trump Administration’s Japan Policies from the Perspective of Diplomatic History —Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, the author of the 1951 peace treaty, declared that Japanʼs
low-quality exports would never find a market in the United States and so it must turn toSoutheast Asia. And then suddenly, one of his aides recalled, Dulles reached into his briefcase.
He “pulled out a cheap Japanese sports shirt” that he had purchased in an American department
store and he yelled at Prime Minister Yoshida, “You canʼt do this to us after all Americaʼs done foryou!”
More recently, historical memories appear to have also informed President Donald Trumpʼsview of Japan. At a June 2018 meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump launched into alist of complaints over Japanese trade and tariff policy. He dismissed seven decades of Japanese–
American friendship, and Trump told a flustered Abe, “I remember Pearl Harbor! OK?” Literally,
this was impossible, because Donald Trump had been born six years after Pearl Harbor, but heconsidered it an important symbolic way to make his point. I want to explore the question of how
we got from the San Francisco peace treaty in 1951 to Trump Tower in 2018.
The American-drafted peace settlement that formally ended the occupation, signed in San
Francisco in 1951, has been praised understandably as a document that welcomed a peaceful anda democratic Japan back into the community of nations. However, it is important to remember
the context. Only two major members of the wartime grand alliance that fought Japan, theUnited States and Great Britain, actually signed the treaty. The United States barred the Peopleʼs
Republic of China from the conference. India and Burma boycotted the meeting, although
they later signed separate treaties with Japan. The Soviet Union and its allies attended the San
Francisco conference but refused to sign the final document. Privately, this refusal delighted
the United States because it left unresolved the problems of the Soviet-held northern territories
and the fate of Japanese prisoners of war still held by the Soviet Union. Soviet-Japanese tension
also deflected Japanese resentment over the U.S. retention of Okinawa. Other participants at theconference made no secret that they still mistrusted Japan. The governments of the Philippines,
New Zealand, and Australia only endorsed the treaty after the U.S. agreed to provide them withsecurity guarantees against both communist and potential Japanese aggression.
So, in spite of its many virtues, the 1951 peace treaty cannot be fully understood without
examining it in both time and space. The restoration of Japanese sovereignty was just one elementof a much broader series of U.S. diplomatic, military, economic arrangements that both reflected
and in some ways outlasted the Cold War. The distinguished historian John Dower has referredto the events of 1951 as creating the “San Francisco system,” an interlocking set of arrangementsthat limited Japanʼs autonomy and defined its relationship to the United States and its Asianneighbors for several decades. I would go even further. To properly understand the armatureor structure or skeleton of containment, it helps to visualize a set of Russian nesting dolls. At its
core is the 1951 peace treaty with Japan. Despite its generous terms, the U.S. retained Okinawa
as a vast military complex for the next two decades. One level further out from the core treaty,
we find the bilateral U.S.–Japan security treaty also signed in San Francisco. This treaty had very
little to do with defending Japan but had much to do with projecting U.S. power in the rest of Asia.
Moving on, we encounter an additional set of security treaties concluded in 1951 between the U.S.,
the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. Further out still, we come upon the 1953 and 1954
U.S. security treaties with South Korea and Taiwan. Enveloping all of these other agreements,
there is an additional set of security arrangements, the 1954 Manila treaty that created the U.S.sponsored Southeast Asia Treaty Organization or SEATO. Dulles, by then U.S. Secretar y ofState, inserted into the SEATO treaty a separate special “protocol,” declaring that the U.S. had aninterest in the security of the just established non-communist portion of Southern Vietnam, justcoming into existence.
These concentric rings of defense treaties represented a military shield as well as a tripwire.
But equally important, it signified a vital economic security zone that the American Secretary of
4Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Michael Schaller

State Dean Acheson in 1949 named the “great crescent.” Without Japan, none of these protectedareas were critical to the United States, but all were deemed essential to safeguard Japan, andby extension U.S. security. The two major wars fought by the United States in Asia after 1945,
in Korea and Vietnam, were to a great degree fought both for and from Japan. This structure ofcontainment radiated outward in time and space from the 1951 peace treaty and evolved to secure
what John Foster Dulles and his many successors called the key U.S. goal in Asia: “keeping Japanon our side.”
From 1948 until the mid-1960s, successive American leaders worried that economic
vulnerability, not Soviet or Chinese military power, posed the most significant threat to Japanand its alliance with the United States. Economic pressure alone, they feared, by either locking
Japan out of Southeast Asia or by dangling the prospect of trade with communist China mightpush Japan toward neutrality or still worse, an alliance with the Soviet bloc. A neutral Japan
would deprive the United States of its base network vital for military operations in the entire
Asia/Pacific region. A Japan whose industrial and military potential was added to the Soviet bloc
could fundamentally alter the balance of power in Asia and beyond. Preventing either of thosepossibilities became the prime motivation of American policy in many ways from the 1950s rightthrough the 1960s and in some ways still resonates today.
In the two years following Japanʼs surrender, the Truman administration paid surprisingly
little attention to the question of Japanʼs future. Instead, the emerging east–west divisions in
Europe, fears of Soviet designs in the Near East, and the dramatic Chinese civil war dominatedalmost all American discussions of foreign policy. President Truman was quite happy to have
one less problem on his plate and left Japan in the hands of General Douglas MacArthur, theSupreme Commander of the Allied Powers. The President allowed MacArthur a nearly free handin implementing plans for demobilization and democratization. The general, in turn, relied upon atalented team of specialists who staffed his headquarters.
For his part, General MacArthur saw Japan as the ideal platform from which to launch his
own pursuit of the 1948 Republican presidential nomination. By mid-1947, MacArthur announced,
without consulting Washington, the time had come to hold a peace conference in Tokyo, presided
over by himself. Japan, he said, would be able to fend for itself economically as soon as theoccupation ended. As for security, MacArthur claimed that a “spiritually transformed” Japan could
rely on a pledge of protection from the United Nations and no American troops or bases should
remain on the island.
These assertions stood in dramatic contrast to the policy outlook evolving in Washington.
In March of 1947, President Truman went in front of Congress to warn of a global Soviet
threat to democracies, the so-called Truman doctrine. In May of 1947, Undersecretary of State
Dean Acheson publicly announced that world peace and security required that the two “great
workshops of Europe and Asia,” Germany and Japan, be rebuilt. In June of 1947, Secretary ofState George Marshall called on Congress to fund a massive European reconstruction program
later known as the Marshall Plan.
Even as MacArthur tried to bully his way towards a peace settlement, key Washington
policymakers decided to dramatically reconfigure American occupation strategy. Men like Navy
Secretary, soon to be Defense Secretary, James Forrestal argued that the Soviet threat meant that
the U.S. had no choice but to “put Japan and Germany and the other affiliates of the Axis powers
back to work.” MacArthurʼs call for a quick peace treaty risked “complete economic collapse”
in Japan, followed by Soviet intervention. Privately, Forrestal and other cabinet officials told thePresident that the survival of the free world required rebuilding the former Axis enemies that
America had vanquished.
Gradually, responsibility for reshaping Japan was handed over to George Kennanʼs State
Department Policy Planning Staff and to like-minded Army officials. Kennan, of course known
5
Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco Peace Treaty— A Look at the Trump Administration’s Japan Policies from the Perspective of Diplomatic History —as the father of containment, viewed Japan much like he did Germany. Kennan wrote to his
superiors and to the President that the “radically changed world situation” required that what hecalled “Hirohitoʼs islands” be made a “buffer state” against the Soviet Union. A “new Japan” would
not “possess an identity of its own,” he wrote, but would “function as an American satellite.” A
stable Japan, in turn, required securing supplies of vital raw materials which were at risk given
communist control of China. This made access to Southeast Asia increasingly important.
Despite MacAr thur ʼ s challenge, President Truman was reluctant to curb the generalʼ sauthority until the spring of 1948. MacArthur lost a series of presidential primary elections in thespring of 1948 and quickly withdrew from his quest for the presidential nomination. In October of1948, Truman approved the so-called Reverse Course in Japan, signified by a document producedby the National Security Council, NSC 13, that decreed economic recovery and security were thetwo “primary objectives” in Japan.
Over the next three years, from the end of 1948 until 1951, American civilian strategists forgeda consensus about the opportunities and risks confronting Japan. In late 1948, Kennanʼs policy
planning staff described the importance of using Japan as an “instrument of political warfare withrespect to communist Asia” while encouraging the flow of raw materials from Southeast Asia toJapan and Western Europe. By 1949, the State Department planners warned that since the Soviets
had been effectively blocked in Europe by the Marshall plan and NATO, Stalin had launched a“coordinated offensive” in Southeast Asia to block the flow of raw materials to Japan and therefore
push Japan toward neutralism or communism. Communist control of Japan, the CIA estimated in1949, would add an astounding 25% to Soviet military–industrial capacity.
With the formal establishment of the communist regime in China in October of 1949, fear
increased in Washington that the Peopleʼs Republic would, at Stalinʼs direction, use the lure of
trade to blackmail Japan. During 1950 and 1951 and in preparation for the peace conference in
San Francisco, U.S. diplomats and journalists described a race they saw between Moscow andWashington to create either a communist or non-communist Co-Prosperity Sphere. They warnedof contrasting plans to establish a “Red Co-Prosperity Sphere” binding Japan to Northeast Asia or
a U.S. Co-Prosperity Sphere linking Japan to Southeast Asia. The Kremlin, American journalists
wrote, were determined to forge a vast “Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere.” They didnʼt see a need toattack Japan directly or risk provoking a U.S military response. Instead, the Soviets would rely
on what one American journalist called the “bowling pin theory.” This was a predecessor to thedomino theory. The bowling pin theory argued that the Soviets and/or China planned to first
seize Southeast Asian resources and use that control to bludgeon Japan into submission.
Soon after the Korean War began in June 1950, special ambassador John Foster Dulles, who
was tasked with writing the peace treaty with Japan, insisted that negotiations for a peace treaty
continue despite the uncertain outcome in Korea. The “communist offensive in Korea,” Dulles
said, was “probably aimed at getting control of Japan.” If South Korea had fallen, “Japan would
fall without an open struggle.” At the same time, Dulles argued, despite the ongoing fightingin Korea, it was vital to keep the peace process going. “If we became totally preoccupied with
Korea,” Dulles said, “we would lose in Japan more than we gained in Korea.”On the eve of John Forster Dullesʼs trip to Japan in February of 1951, to work out the detailsof a peace settlement, Newsweek magazine, then one of the two big American news weeklies,
featured a cover stor y on Japan with a picture of Prime Minister Yoshida, and it was called“Americaʼs latest ally.” Newsweek featured two maps in that article, both of them superimposedon Japanʼs wartime Co-Prosperity Sphere. One showed U.S. military bases in Japan, which could
dominate Asia in the future. A second map demonstrated how after the “loss of China” Japan must
“look to Southeast Asia” as a source of raw materials.
When consulting with Japanese and American of ficials in Tokyo in early 1951, Dulles
stressed that Japanʼs chief long-term value as an ally lay in its industrial potential, not as an
6Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Michael Schaller

American forward base. This was a source of endless arguments between American civilian andmilitary leaders. Dulles always believed that it was dangerous to over-militarize the U.S.–Japan
relationship. Japan was more useful as an economic than military ally. In contrast, the Joint Chiefsof Staff insisted that Japanʼs greatest value was as a vast militar y base network in Northeast
Asia. Dulles insisted that the “principle problem” that he foresaw in post-occupation Japan washow, with China off-limits, Japan could possibly prosper without becoming a burden to theUnited States. He envisioned Southeast Asia as Japanʼs most likely source of raw materials andmarkets, assuming communism could be stopped in Indochina. Unless the U.S. made sure, hesaid, that “Japan worked for us,” he cautioned, “it will work for the other side.” This fundamental
belief shaped American policy in Asia and the Pacific for a generation. It inspired Washingtonʼsdetermination to isolate China and it spawned the various regional military alliances mentioned
earlier. Above all, it became the prime motivation for America ʼ s escalating involvement in
Vietnam, which became seen as the pivot for control of Southeast Asia and hence, indirectly, thekey to Japanʼs survival.
It hardly mattered that over the next twenty years, absolutely none of these dire fears andpredictions voiced by American planners about China, Southeast Asia, or trade with the U.S. wereactually grounded in fact. They were, quite simply, illusions. During the 1950s, Chinaʼs primitive
economy as well as Mao Zedongʼs ambivalence about foreign trade severely limited Beijingʼswillingness or ability to blackmail Japan. Southeast Asia, of course, later became a major trading
partner of Japanʼs, but only in the 1960s, long after economic recovery was underway. And to theconsternation of American economic experts who questioned Japanʼs ability to ever find markets
in the West, Japan by the mid-1950s had begun selling textiles, ceramics, consumer electronics
in ever increasing volume to the United States. Even though American fears were highly
exaggerated, they nevertheless shaped U.S. policy in the 1950s and 1960s.
The most contentious issue facing John Foster Dulles as he prepared the San Francisco peace
treaty related to China and U.S. military bases. The British, who were understandably concerned
about the vulnerability of Hong Kong and worried about potential Japanese competition inSoutheast Asia, were appalled at the pressure the Americans applied to Tokyo to deal only with
Taiwan in the post-occupation period. When Prime Minister Churchill suggested that a sovereign
Japan should be free to set its own China policy, Dulles snapped at him that it was simply“inconceivable” Washington would ever permit Japan to “pursue foreign policies which cut acrossthose of the United States.”
When the peace and security treaties came up for ratification in the U.S. Senate in early 1952,
Secretary of State Acheson and John Foster Dulles testified in front of the Senate in secret. They
explained that the U.S. needed a friendly Japan as much as Japan needed a friendly U.S. The
Soviet Union, they said, had determined to exploit the industrial capacities of Germany and Japan.
If the Kremlin ever gained control of Japan, the “stage would be set for a climactic struggle ofdoubtful outcome.” After a prolonged delay, the Senate finally ratified both the peace and security
treaties in March 1952, acting only after the Japanese government agreed to surrender legal
jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel in Japan, accepted strict limits on Japanʼs trade with
China, and pledged to sign a peace treaty with Taiwan, not the Peopleʼs Republic.
Despite the many achievements at San Francisco, Americans still worried about Japanʼsfuture. They voiced special concern over the erosion of the French position in Indochina. During
the summer of 1952, the National Security Council analyzed the impact of a possible French
defeat in Indochina. They predicted that “Japanʼs access to raw materials and markets” would
determine its future cooperation with the U.S. The “loss of Southeast Asia,” the National Security
Council concluded, would “inevitably force Japan into an accommodation with the communistcontrolled areas of Asia.” The loss of Indochina would “lead to swift submission or alignment with
communism by all states in the area.” Unfortunately, the National Security Council reported, the7Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco Peace Treaty— A Look at the Trump Administration’s Japan Policies from the Perspective of Diplomatic History —American public remained “largely indifferent” to the struggle against communism in Southeast
Asia and it called on the President to prepare the public for more direct intervention.
Within days of President Dwight Eisenhowerʼs taking office in Januar y of 1953, his new
Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, delivered a radio and television speech in which he argued
that the Soviets were “making a drive to get Japan,” not only through their actions in Korea, “butthrough what they were doing in Indochina.” The loss of the “rice bowl of Asia,” as he called it,
would jeopardize Japanʼs survival as an American ally. Military leaders as well as civilian leaders
argued that the loss of Indochina would lead to the loss of Southeast Asia and that “would
lead to the loss of Japan.” As John Foster Dulles put it privately, the moment Indochina fell tocommunism, the “Japs...would be thinking on how to get to the other side.”
These concerns explained much of the anxiety that gripped Washington from 1954 forward as
the Vietminh guerrillas laid siege to French forces at Dien Bien Phu. President Eisenhower, John
Foster Dulles, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff all feared that a French defeat or a political deal
at the peace talks underway in Geneva in the spring of 1954 might breach what they called the“great crescent” of containment surrounding China. The possible outcomes, a French surrender,
creation of a coalition government, or the partition of Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned,
would impress most Asians as a “communist victory.” Inevitably, Japan, the “keystone of U.S.
policy in the Far East,” would reach an “accommodation with the communist bloc.” A Red victoryin Indochina, Dulles announced at a Cabinet meeting, would cut Americaʼs defense lines in half.
Stopping communism in Indochina, Dulles told journalists, was of “transcendent importance.”
Nevertheless, by April, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu faced annihilation. President
Eisenhower made a deeply personal appeal to British Prime Minister Churchill for some sort ofunited American–British action to save the French garrison. The loss of Indochina, Eisenhower
wrote to Churchill, would place such tremendous pressure on Japan, it would be impossible toprevent Tokyo from “reaching a deal with the communist world.” Failure to act, Eisenhower
implored, would be as grave a mistake as the failure of the democratic states in the 1930s to “stopHirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in time.” The President said much the same thingin public. The U.S. “simply canʼt afford” to lose Indochina, Eisenhower told journalists. A French
defeat would cause all Southeast Asia to “go quickly,” like “a row of dominoes.” Japan, clearly theultimate domino, would have no choice, he said, but to gravitate “toward the communist area
in order to live.” In a briefing to members, leaders of Congress, Eisenhower warned the lossof Japan would push the U.S. “out of the Pacific” and the entire Pacific Ocean “would become acommunist lake.”In spite of these and other warnings, neither the British government nor the U.S. Congress
supported military intervention to save the French. At Geneva, following the defeat of the French
at Dien Bien Phu, France agreed to disengage from Indochina. The U.S. declined to sign the
Geneva Accords in 1954, but Dulles expressed relief at the “relatively moderate” terms acceptedby the communists, given their militar y strength on the ground. The United States, Dulles
explained, would “go along” with the Geneva Accords if the British and French promised to“support American efforts to create a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.” These efforts, Dulles
made clear, all related to Japan, which he again described as the entire “soul of the situation in
the Far East.” Denied access to Southeast Asia, Japan would slip away and without Japan, the U.S.
position would “become untenable” in Asia. To prevent this, of course, Dulles and Eisenhower
began plans to support anti-communist forces in southern Vietnam, doing everything possible,
they said, to “avoid having elections” since the communists would probably win at the polls.
In September of 1954, Dulles convened a foreign ministersʼ meeting in Manila, attended byonly two regional nations, the Philippines and Thailand, that produced one more alliance, theSoutheast Asia Treaty. Dulles worked around the prohibition that barred Vietnam from joining
a military alliance by declaring in a separate protocol to the SEATO pact that the U.S. retained a
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Michael Schaller

vital security interest in Vietnam.
Throughout the remainder of the 1950s, Japanese and American officials squabbled over many
issues, such as the levels and pace of rearmament. The U.S. wanted more and faster Japanese
rearmament while the Japanese wanted less, slower. They argued over how to manage Japan ʼs bid
to relax restrictions on trade with China. They argued about how best to promote trade expansion
between Japan and Southeast Asia. Through it all, President Eisenhower proved surprisingly
adept at smoothing over the hard edges of U.S.–Japan disputes. Much to the displeasure ofAmerican manufacturers, Eisenhower actually encouraged the expansion of Japanese exports to
the U.S., and he even showed some flexibility towards permitting Japanese trade with communist
China. Eventually, he overruled Dulles and endorsed revising the 1951 U.S.–Japan security treaty.
On several occasions during the late 1950s, Eisenhower responded to critics of his policy byexplaining that since Japan must export to survive, it had a clear choice. It could sell battleships to
Beijing or cotton blouses to American consumers. And he said, U.S. textile manufacturers would
simply have to adjust to that reality. In one of his last comments on Japan and Southeast Asia,
in a 1959 speech that Eisenhower gave at Gettysburg College that was widely circulated among
Japanese government officials, Eisenhower revealed what he saw as the link connecting American
security, the Japanese economy, and the survival of South Vietnam. America, he insisted, must
increase its commitment to South Vietnam to prevent the crumbling of the barrier to communism
in Southeast Asia. Why did this matter? It mattered because Japan, the essential counterweight
to communist strength in Asia, needed the regionsʼ trade to live. Strengthening Vietnam andSoutheast Asia, Eisenhower declared, ensured Japanʼs survival as an ally. Abandoning Vietnam
or restricting Japanʼs trade with the U.S. (as some protectionists favored) the President warned,
would risk the free worldʼs stake in the entire Pacific.
From the 1950s through 1968, Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson remainedcommitted to protecting South Vietnam as part of the strategy to stabilize and secure the alliancewith Japan. Between 1955 and ʻ65, the U.S. steadily increased economic and military support forSouth Vietnam, culminating eventually in the full Americanization of that war in 1965.
All three American presidents, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, believed that a failure to holdthe line in Southeast Asia would inevitably create conditions that pushed Japan toward neutralism
or an accommodation with the communist bloc. In their private discussions, American politicalleaders and strategists often worried that unlike the European allies, Japanese loyalty to the Westwas purely situational, that even nominally conservative Japanese political and economic leaders
might switch Cold War allegiances if faced with the loss of U.S. or Southeast Asian markets.
Despite all evidence to the contrar y, right through the early 1970s, American policymakers
continued to fear that Japanese trade with China would somehow lure Japan behind the Iron
Curtain, rather than luring China out.
Although Japan played no direct role in the Vietnam War, the conflict impacted Japan and theregion in many ways. The extremely high levels of Vietnam-related U.S. military spending during
the 1960s reinvigorated Japanese economic growth and created a mounting Japanese trade
surplus with the U.S. Equally significant, the wartime flow of U.S. dollars into the Southeast Asia
region stimulated and partly financed the rapid growth of Japanese trade with Southeast Asia, thevery thing Americans had been hoping for since the 1940s.
Despite the fact that U.S. policies in East and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era
were intended to bolster the San Francisco system, the unintended results of American policies
simultaneously undermined the ver y system that Washington struggled to preser ve. For
example, the unpopular stalemated war in Vietnam, Japanʼs growing trade surplus, the erosion of
the dollar, and the Chinese–Soviet split all compelled American policymakers to revisit their longstanding assumptions.
The Nixon Shocks of 1971, ending dollar–gold convertibility, threatening to impose stiff tariffs
9Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

U.S.-Japan Ties Since the San Francisco Peace Treaty— A Look at the Trump Administration’s Japan Policies from the Perspective of Diplomatic History —on Japanese imports, and the U.S. opening to China, reconfigured key elements of U.S. strategy
throughout Asia. It also led to a discussion that had been latent in U.S.–Japanese relations formany years, the notion of “double containment.” This concept held that the American military
alliance with Japan served two purposes. It not only protected Japan from external aggression,
but also allowed the United States to exercise a key measure of control over Japanʼs behavior.
Even John Foster Dulles who had spent so much energy urging Japan to rearm in the 1950s, at
one point in 1957, said that he sometimes questioned if it made sense to arm Japan too heavily
if it meant “putting arms in the hands of people who are going to shoot in the wrong direction.”
Richard Nixon, as Vice President in the 1950s, also urged Japan to rearm, but in 1972, he
explicitly promoted the idea of “double containment” during his conversations with Chinese
communist leaders. Nixon pushed back against demands from Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai
when he met them in February of 1972 that the U.S. abandon its security alliance with Japan. The
President asked Mao and Zhou whether they had seriously considered the alternative, a Japan
uncoupled from American restraints. “Do we want the second most prosperous powerful nation in
Asia to go it alone,” Nixon asked, “or do we provide a shield?” Wasnʼt a U.S. veto over Japan “lessdangerous to China than a Japan-only policy?” Without U.S. bases in Japan, Nixon added, the “wildhorse of Japan could not be controlled.”
During the thirty years following Nixon ʼs opening to China, the U.S.–Japan relationshipbent in many ways but never broke. The U.S. was no longer obsessed after 1972, at least until
recently, by the “China threat.” Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan actually looked at
China as much as at Japan as a buffer against the Soviet Union during the last stages of the Cold
War. After the Soviet collapse in 1991, Presidents Bush and Clinton promoted Chinese economic
modernization and its entry into the global trading network as the best way to stabilize Asia. The
U.S.–Japan security treaty remained nominally in effect but it appeared less and less central toAmericaʼs regional strategy in Asia.
That dynamic shifted again after 2001. Responding to terrorist attacks, U.S. policymakers
refocused resources and attention to the Middle East. Meanwhile, with remarkable speed,
China became the second largest economy in the world and a global export giant. Gradually,
the Peopleʼs Republic of China channeled its new wealth into military modernization and has
asserted bold territorial and maritime claims in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
China went from being a late-Cold War ally of the U.S. and a counterweight to Russia and possibly
a counter weight to Japan to becoming what Washington now perceives as an economic andsecurity rival. One of the many interesting aspects of Trumpʼs recent anti-China rhetoric is theways in which it closely echoes the anti-Japanese rhetoric popular among American officials
during the 1970s and ʻ80s when Washington pundits warned of Japanese schemes to dominate theworld economy and turn the Pacific into a Japanese lake. Some of the most critical “Japan-bashers”
even spoke of a secret Japanese plan to reverse the verdict of the Pacific War and subdue theUnited States.
In more normal times, we might anticipate that increased trade and security tensions
between the U.S. and China would result logically in closer U.S.–Japan cooperation, But in theera of Trump, few things are that simple. President Trump has challenged traditional American
allies, such as Canada, Mexico, South Korea, and the European Union, over a variety of tradeand security issues. At the same time, he has deployed a charm offensive toward traditional
adversaries, including Russia and North Korea.
Trump ʼ s treatment of Japan seems to lie somewhere in the middle, between these two
extremes. In spite of Prime Minister Abeʼs public and private efforts to appease the President,
Trump has continued to complain bitterly about Japanʼs trade practices, to threaten tariffs, andfume about the high cost of American-provided security. This resentment seems to have surfacedin his cruel reference to the Pearl Harbor attack during his meeting with Prime Minister Abe.
10
Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Michael Schaller

These tensions, along with Trumpʼs unpredictability on issues such as North Koreaʼs nuclear
and missile threats, have increased anxiety among Japanese that their interests and security may
be casually sacrificed by a mercurial President with little interest in or understanding of history.
In my lifetime, certainly, I had never expected to see an American leader describe exchanging
what he called “love letters” with a North Korean dictator. Might Trump make a nuclear weaponsand missile deal with North Korea that undercuts both South Korea and Japan? What once
seemed unimaginable now appears at least possible. Is the U.S. willing or even able to confront
Chinese hegemony in the South China Sea? We simply donʼt know. Uncertainty over these andrelated issues will most likely add momentum to efforts within Japan to jettison the no-war clauseof the constitution and adopt a more independent and assertive foreign and security policy.
Let me close by revisiting the question posed to John Emmerson in September 1945 by thejunior Mitsui executive. How did the United States propose to reorganize post-war Asia? In someways, I would argue, during the occupation and the Cold War, it did reconfigure its own version ofa Co-Prosperity Sphere in which Washington and Tokyo formed a dominant partnership over theregion. That arrangement dominated East and Southeast Asia through the mid-1970s. It persisted
in a modified form through the end of the century, maintaining an imperfect balance of power.
But, increasingly the U.S., Japan, China and the other nations that sit astride the “great crescent”
are moving into unchartered waters without any clear navigational aids to guide them.

11Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Uncertainty and the Political Construction of the EU-Japan Diplomatic Dialogue: The Cold War Years and the New Scenario

Uncertainty and the Political Construction of the EU-Japan
Diplomatic Dialogue:
The Cold War Years and the New Scenario*
Oliviero Frattolillo**

Abstract
As a historian more than a political analyst who deals with East Asia and particularly withJapan in the modern era, I have focused my attention in this paper on the constructionof Europe-Japan relations especially during the Cold War years. The effects of the eventsoccurred in those years are still evident today in the relations between the two parties.
This is particularly noticeable within the pure dimension of the historical interconnections
from the diplomatic point of view, despite the increasing relevance of the relations on theeconomic and trade level, for example with the Japan-European Partnership Agreement(EPA), which draws the attention of a number of analysts world-wide.

The path of low diplomacy (1952-1989)

Modern relations between Japan and Europe have constantly been inscribed into ahistorical narrative that confirmed the absolute pre-eminence of mutual indifference
on a diplomatic level, due especially to Japan ʼ s oppor tunistic or str ucturalindifference about high politics discourse, that derived from the Yoshida Doctrine.
This is an image that has often been constructed without being interpreted in the Japanesecontext, or, according to Carol Gluck, “without bringing the outside in”. In her own words: “InJapanese eyes, the world sometimes loomed larger in the gazing imagination when it was mostabsent in the environment of action.”1 The external world exerted a strong influence in Japanʼsdomestic history as a country that once belonged to a pre-existing order (the Chinese order) thatwas very far removed from the peculiarities of the Westphalian system. So, while occurrences inthe European political landscape became experience, they were moulded into history for Japan,
which reacted accordingly. So we may see the story as a whole as well as the reverse side of it andthe plot that therefore structured the interactions between the two actors derived from a specificreading of events in both political spaces. Only by I think, correlating the images and perceptionsof Japanese histor y and the European context can we bridge these other wise apparently
unconnected behaviors and elevate their interactions to the status of historical narrative.
A number of themes and dimensions – historical, economic and strategic - are involved in its
foreign policy with Europe. Furthermore, the role of the US, and more specifically, the evolving
This article is based on a presentation made by the author at the symposium “Japan and the World in
the 20th Century” held by JIIA on 29 March, 2018.
** Oliviero Frattolillo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics of Roma Tre University,
specializing in Japanese modern history and international politics.
1
C. Gluck, ʻPatterns of the Past: Themes in Japanese Historyʼ, C. Gluck, A.T. Embree (eds.), Asia in
Western and World History, New York: East Gate Book, 1997, p. 759.
*

12Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Oliviero Frattolillo

post-war relationship between Tokyo and Washington conditioned and encouraged Japan to seeka circumscribed low-profile diplomatic approach to Europe. To make sense of this, it is necessary
to employ a deductive analytical framework that I think takes into account the wider and deeper
political trends occurring in Japan and clearly conditioned its engagement with Europe.
Inoguchi Takahashi had proposed an understanding of Japan ʼ s historical models orperceptions as “free rider” in economic and security terms, “challenger” in trade terms andas “ suppor ter ” of international economic and political structures.2 It is the coexistence of
these models that represented an enigma to Europe. This inconvenient apposition continued
throughout almost the entire Cold War era, although the image of Japan as a supportive as well ascompetitive member of the international community was growing, was ascending.
These perceptions seem to conciliate, in some way, those provided by Christopher Hughes,in accordance with whom, throughout the history of its interaction with Europe, Japan assumed
three different images in the eyes of its counterpart, gradually switching over from “peril” during
the 60s, to “partner” during the 1980s, and finally to participant during the 1990s and onwards.3
The alternation of these phases which is accompanied by multiple identities and various mutual
perceptions was the product of internal and external historical instances referable to both actors.
And the correlation between European and Japanese experience is not only an epistemologicalstance but was actually applied for and built into Japanese discourses and practices in order tolegitimize the implementation of a Japanese horizontal political community in relation to a notmerely America-centered West. So as long as what Harry Harootunian defined “Americaʼs Japan”
has deeply moulded the image that the country had of itself, Japanʼs interaction with Europe has
been jeopardized in several ways.4
According, for example, to Carl Gluck, Japan seemed to be in some way hostage of its own
post- war history, mainly through the relationship with the US. In her own words, “most countries
ceased, stopped to speak of themselves as post-war in the domestic sense by the late 50s andbecame instead “contemporary”. Japanʼs long post-war was as distinctive as it was anachronistic.5
So as stressed by Iwabuchi Kōichi, in the post-war years, Japanʼs attention was turned to its
cultural relation with the West, effectively with the US as its most significant cultural “other”
against which Japanese national identity has been constructed.6
If we look back on the Japanese history of the past 50 years, it would seem that Japan, in along-term perspective, successfully managed a series of issues relating to its interactions with
Europe by adopting a low-profile approach. During the first half of the Cold War, Japan was
criticized for its supposedly single-minded focus on economic expansion, so that in France, thepublic image of Japanese Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato reductively became that of a transistor
salesman. Nevertheless by the 1970s, Europe started to look at Japan to help manage an economy
ever more interdependent on the world stage, while during the 1980s, the country had alreadybecome a European partner on a political and partly strategic level.
Japanʼs ability to successfully overcome the diplomatic or political impasse with the European
2

Inoguchi T., ʻTinkering Every 15 Years: A New Major Turn in Japanʼs Foreign policy?ʼ, Japan Spotlight:
Economic, Culture & History, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 38-39.

3

C.W. Hughes, “Japan in Europe: Asian and European Perspectives”, in G.D. Hook, H. Hasegawa (eds.),
The Political Economy of Japanese Globalization, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 56-69.

4

D.H. Harootunian, ʻAmericaʼs Japan/Japanʼs Japanʼ, in Miyoshi M., H.D. Harootunian (eds.), Japan in
the World, Durham: Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 196-221.

5

C. Gluck, ʻThe Past in the Presentʼ, in A. Gordon (ed.), Postwar Japan as History, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993, p. 93.

6

Iwabuchi K., Recentering Globalization. Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002, p. 9.

13Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Uncertainty and the Political Construction of the EU-Japan Diplomatic Dialogue: The Cold War Years and the New Scenario

counterpart during the post-war decades evidently lies in its attitude to implement pragmaticchanges in its foreign policy. Such changes occurred within a liberal framework that sought toreconcile Japanʼs growing involvement in the international economy with a gradual engagementof the country on regional and global security issues.
That we can say that throughout the 1950s, the international situation remained marked bya high level of ideological tension. In the US a great debate was in progress regarding the new
ideology of national security that did not lessen the worries of those who felt the need to deter
Soviets without turning the country into a garrison state.7 And this is why the main objective of
the US was to make Japan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”8 and ally in the containment action
and a means of reassuring Asian neighbors against the onset of new pro-militarist tendencies.
So, although diplomatic contacts with various European states embassies were resumed, formost of the 50s, relations with Europe were marked by a growing distrust of Japan, enhanced by
its intensifying trade frictions with the US.
And it is important to remember that a long trip undertaken by Prime Minister Yoshida
Shigeru in 1954 brought him to Europe earlier than the US. Many Japanese said that this was
Yoshidaʼs hanamichi, or “great departure”,9 and some European countries such as the United
Kingdom, France, Holland and Germany were concerned about the threats that the Japanese
textile industry could represent for their own industries. And there was considerable resistanceto its entry into the GATT in 1955, although the Americans pushed for it.
Nor did Tokyo not show any greater enthusiasm in 1957 when it welcomed the news that theTreaty of Rome has been signed, establishing the European Economic Community. So without
underestimating the profound implications that caused the special relationship with Washington,
it is undeniable that Europeans perceived Japan as a “peril”, a threatening presence to theeconomic vitality of individual European states and to the unity itself of Europe.10 The strong
competition caused by Japanese multinationals in European markets was compounded by theirtendency to create tensions between the various member states. As also noted by Christopher
Dent, the Japanese were convinced that “ the countr y ʼ s interests would be best ser ved by
exploiting European disunity and challenging the rationale of Europeʼs discriminator y trade
policies”.11
The 1962 diplomatic and trade offensive in Europe initiated by Ikeda, together with the mostimportant representatives of the Keidanren, was conceived in these terms, and this new phasecoincided with, and at the same time has produced a new course in its political relations with theWest. By now, Japan was, alongside with the US and Western Europe, one of the three pillarsof the free world.12 Ikeda was aware that in order to stabilize the domestic political situation,
by putting down the turmoil of the Leftist forces and reducing the countr yʼs dependence on
Washington, Tokyo must continue to pursue a line of close cooperation and friendly diplomacy

7

M. Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State 1945-1954,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 24.

8

R.J. Samuels, “Rich Nation, Strong Army”: National Security and Technological Transformation of Japan,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1994, p. 132.

9

K. Miyazawa, R.D. Eldridge, Secret Talks Between Tokyo and Washington: The Memoirs of Miyazawa
Kiichi 1949-1954, UK: Lexington, 2007, p. 134.

10

C.W. Hughes, ʻJapan in Europeʼ, in G.D. Hook, H. Hasegawa (eds.), The Political Economy of Japanese
Globalization, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 56-69.

11

C.M. Dent, The European Union and East Asia, London: Routledge, 1999, p. 87.

12

M. Iokibe, Sengo Nihon gaikō-shi, Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 2006, pp. 116-117.

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Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Oliviero Frattolillo

with both the US and Europe.13 However, at that time, this vision was not shared by either
the White House or the European powers. It was an impossible project to achieve since,
understandably, Washington would not favour a process that allowed Japan to break away fromthe exclusive US strategic orbit. And at this point, it is easy to imagine how, in this new decade,Japan–Europe relations continued to be dominated by trade disputes.
On the other hand, at this historical moment, even the US decided to accord secondar yimportance to Europe. And during a visit to China in February 1973, Henry Kissinger told Zhou
Enlai and Mao Zedong that the Europeans “cannot do anything anyway. They are basicallyirrelevant”.14 On 26 September, Tanaka began a lengthy trip to Europe that took him to Paris,
Bonn and London, the first time for a Japanese official since Ikeda in 1962.
And Japanese politicians seemed to show a cer tain carelessness in relation to theircounterparts, and were mainly concerned with reconstructing their diplomatic and commercial
relations with China and the countries of Southeast Asia. On the other hand, Europe perceived
Japan as arrogant, citing its protectionism and reluctance to respond to European complaints. In
Bert Edströmʼs words: “Despite the Tanaka governmentʼs interest in establishing close ties with
Western Europe, there was something of a gap between the rhetoric of cooperating with Europe
and the actual policy pursued by the government”.15
During the 1980s, Japanese–European relations began to take on more political depth. In
European common perception, Japan was transformed from “peril” to “partner” as the result of
the countryʼs first experience of political maturity in conjunction with awareness on the part of theEuropeans that they were interfacing with an actor capable of working in partnership with bothindividual member states and Brussels. So, since the end of World War II and well into the 80s,
relations between Japan and Europe have been characterized by a coldness in terms of diplomatic
dialogue, alternated with trade disputes.
Cold War geopolitics made a decisive contribution in depriving Japan of an ef fective,
independent foreign policy, and most of its choices in international security matters tended todepend on decisions made in Washington.

The new diplomatic scenario
Following the end of the Cold War in Asia, the new debate within leading Japanese circles wascentered on the need for Tokyo to frame its foreign policy within a new doctrine. Although the
Yoshida Doctrine delegated national security to the US and included economism among its
primary goals, Japan was able to conceptualize a vision of soft security with aims that were widely
shared by the US.
Especially after the signing of the EU-Japan Action Plan in 2001, Tokyo and Brussels initiateda fruitful and multilateral cooperation, as shown by their involvement in projects in countries
afflicted by instability and security problems. So first of all it will be fully legitimate, and indeed
13

During this period Japanese domestic politics were going through a critical phase, in part due tothe 1960 general elections; this also affected the countryʼs relations with the PRC. First, one shouldtake into account what was happening within the JSP, which had always encouraged rapprochementwith Peking. Eda Saburō, general secretary of the JSP, rejected what was stated in Asanumaʼs 1958
declaration, declaring instead that Japan would continue to pursue a policy of close collaboration with
the U.S. His words garnered Chinese hostility, and Sasaki Kōzō (a member of the extremist wing)
was preferred to Eda. In January 1962, Suzuki Mosaburō, former president of the JSP, visited China toreaffirm Asanumaʼs declaration, stating that the underlying cause of the absence of Japan-China official
diplomatic relations was due to American imperialism as well as Ikeda administration.

14

Quoted in R. Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger. Partners in Power, London: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 466. See
also H. Kissinger, White House Years, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

15

B. Edström, The Japanese and Europe: Images and Perceptions, Richmond Surrey: Curzon, 2000, p. 219.

15
Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Uncertainty and the Political Construction of the EU-Japan Diplomatic Dialogue: The Cold War Years and the New Scenario

helpful, to question how the EU is perceived in Japan, and whether or not Tokyo considers
Brussels to be a leading player in foreign policy and global security. And the short answers tothese questions are most likely “positively” and to what extent and within what limits respectively?
On the negative side, common knowledge regarding the EU is still very scarce in Japan. It
rarely makes the front-page news, and only a relatively small number of Japanese scholars andpoliticians understand and are interested in how Brussels works. However, this phenomenon
seems to be undergoing gradual changes in Japan, with a growing number of universities offeringcourses in European Studies, the rise of specialized research institutes, the flux of Japanesescholars studying and teaching in Europe, which is constantly increasing, and young people
involved in international exchange programs.16
Since the late 80s, and especially after the adoption of the Hague Declaration in 1991, a
specific “EU factor” began to influence all the political relations between Japan and Europe,
although the former continued to reinforce its bilateral ties with individual European states.
However, while Japan and the EU have jointly promoted the idea of a comprehensive reform of
the United Nations, there has never been a common EU–Japan position on the content of thisreform.17 Partly because of the complexity of EU decision-making process, and partly because ofa lack of understanding of how responsibility is distributed between the EUʼs institutions and its
members, Japanese policy makers still seem uncertain about the true force of Brusselsʼ weighton the world stage, on which important decisions that affect Japan are taken by each member
State and adopted by the Union as a whole. The failure of the referenda on the EU Constitutional
Treaty in the Netherlands and France in 2005 were taken by Japanese politicians as a sign that
EU integration has limitations and that Tokyo must continue to deal with both the national
governments and Brussels in order to “get the most out of Europe”.
The logical approach adopted by Japan in expanding its relations with the EU after the endof the Cold War was to “diversify” its international relations and security policies, which until
then had been almost entirely defined within the framework of its bilateral alliance with the US.18
Japan believed that privileged relations with the EU would redress the balance of its international
diplomacy, making it less vulnerable to accusations that its regional, foreign and security policies
needed to be checked, or even “approved” by Washington. In November 2002, a report from the“Task Force on Foreign Relations” - a body established to advise former prime minister Koizumi identified the EU as a “strong partner” in certain areas of cooperation. As stressed by the report,
in a new world order, Japan needs to have a partner in relation to every single issue. Europe could
be construed as a rational choice of partner for some topics. The Task Force also warned that it
would be necessary for Japan to choose between dealing with the EU or with individual European
countries on a bilateral level, on a case-by-case basis. This is indicative of Japanʼs desire to be surethat it can continue to interact with single EU members when it best suits its own interests.
16

See U. Niemann, ʻThe Dynamics of People-to-People Exchanges Between Asia and Europeʼ
Chulalongkorn University Journal of European Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, July-December 2001, pp. 28-34;
P. Lim, ʻBeyond Economic Cooperation: Prospects for Mutual Social, Cultural and Educational Tiesʼ,in The 3rd Seoul ASEM and Asia-Europe Relations, Seoul: Korean Society for Contemporary European
Studies, 2000, pp. 109-133; N. Chaban, M. Holland (eds.), The European Union and the Asia-Pacific.
Media, Public and Elite Perceptions of the EU, London: Routledge, 2008; N. Chaban, M. Holland, P.
Ryan (eds.), The EU Through the Eyes of Asia. New Cases, New Findings, vol. II, Singapore: World
Scientific, 2009. For a detailed historical overview on the subject, starting from the 1970s, see Iwasa T.,
West European Academic Images and Stereotypes of Japan Since the 1970s, Doctoral thesis, Florence:
European University Institute, Department of History and Civilization, 2007.

17

See Nakanishi T., Naze Yōroppa to te wo musubu no ka. Nichi-Ō shinjidai no sentaku, Tokyo: Bensei
shuppan, 1996.

18

See Funabashi Y., China-Japan-US: managing the trilateral relationship, Tokyo: JCIE, 1998.

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Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Oliviero Frattolillo

Despite the growing importance of the EU in foreign policy and global security, the MOFA
still provides substantial human and financial resources for departments dealing with Asia andUS, rather than Europe. In addition, because of the division of labour within the ministry (andalso taking into account the competition between the inter-ministerial bureaucrats dealing witheconomic, political and security matters) Tokyo cannot lay claim to a single coherent strategy
concerning the EU.19
From the Japanese point of view, the EU can contribute very little, if at all, to the country ʼssecurity given both the close defence ties existing between Washington and Tokyo and East
Asiaʼs security environment, still fragile. It would seem it is a commonly held belief in Japanthat any initiative to cooperate with the EU in the field of security can only be complementary
to its military relationship with the US, which focuses on hard security whereas the JapaneseEuropean cooperation on security issues emphasizes its non-military aspects. The effectivenessand outcomes of all joint efforts aimed at contributing to global peace and stability therefore
inevitably depend on Japanʼs ability to successfully implement the two approaches together. Overthe past decade, Brussels and Tokyo have participated in many joint initiatives and established aform of dialogue that has focused on many issues, as mentioned above. However, the EU-Japan
cooperation on nuclear disarmament lacks credibility given that Japan continues to enjoy theprotection of the US nuclear umbrella, while in Europe it is not seen as a priority, and indeed it
might be said that it is not even an option for at least two member states (the UK and France).
After the North Korean nuclear test carried out in October 2006, some prominent membersof the LDP indicated that a nuclear-armed North Korea could turn on Japan again in a debate overthe development of nuclear deterrents. In September 2005, the EU and Japan launched a “strategic
dialogue on security in Asia” in which they discussed issues of regional security in Asia at regularinstitutional meetings. Between 2004 and 2005, both Japan and the US were concerned that the
EU would lift the embargo on China and resume its weapons and military technology exports
to the country, thus helping Peking in its efforts to modernize its armed forces. Both countries
complained – officially, as well as unofficially - that Brussels did not seem to be sufficiently awareof the possible impact of EU policies towards China, and suggested that these and other questions
should be periodically addressed by the EU, the US and Japan on a bilateral basis.
We should perhaps question whether ʻstrategic dialogueʼ between the EU and Japan has alogic sense beyond the discussions over the embargo, and whether there are enough strategic
issues of common interest in Asia to form the basis of a discussion. North Korea and its nuclear
programme is certainly one of these problems. Disagreements on political issues between the EU
and Japan are extremely rare. The non-military security cooperation between the two parties, thejoint support for the ICC and the signing of numerous protocols for disarmament demonstrate
the similarity of both actorsʼ approaches to international security and non-proliferation.
However, while Japan and the EU have jointly promoted the idea of a comprehensive reformof the United Nations, there has never been a common EU-Japan position on the content of thisreform.On the other hand, this should not be surprising given that Japan and Germany, one of
the most important EU member states, were primarily focused on obtaining a permanent seat on
the UN Security Council. The absence of concrete action that would make stronger the politicaland security relations beyond the current level suggests that the timeframe of the EU–Japan Joint
Action Plan will remain relatively slow, or “without surprises”, in the coming years.
This is easily understandable given the priorities of the EU foreign policy agenda, on the
one hand, and Japanʼs security ties with the US, on the other. However, it should be noted that,in Japan, the perception of the EU as a player in foreign policy and security is, to some extent,
improving. Its past contributions to security in Asia marked it out as a potentially important
19

See J. Gilson, Japan and the European Union, London: MacMillan, 2000.

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Uncertainty and the Political Construction of the EU-Japan Diplomatic Dialogue: The Cold War Years and the New Scenario

and constructive partner for Asia and for Japan itself. So the progress made to date in terms ofcombining resources and coordinating policies relating to conflict prevention and peace building
is not negligible. However, as the two parties did for the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA)
which is recently entered into force, Brussels and Tokyo could certainly stand to do more also on
the political level.

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Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Hiroshi Nakanishi

Turbulence in the Post-war Order andIssues in Japanese Diplomacy*
Hiroshi Nakanishi**
Abstract
Few would deny that a sense of insecurity is growing across the world today. One might
say that, at the root of such sense of insecurity, there exists a turbulence in the post-war
order, which has been the basis of the peace and prosperity that the world has enjoyed formore than 70 years. We have a tendency to focus on particular individuals and phenomena.
However, distinctive individuals and events are the signs̶and also the results̶of changes
that are both structural and long-term. In this paper, the author presents an overview of the
trajectory of changes in the post-war order and points out three factors that have hollowed
out the post-war order from the inside: emergence of a risk society, the rise of the rest, anddecline in the political leadership of the democratic system. The author also suggests thatJapan should enhance the ability to make strategic judgments that determine the allocationof limited resources in order to maintain its peace and prosperity in such a turbulent world.

Introduction

F

ew would deny that a sense of insecurity is growing across the world today. Of course,
this is a question of perception, and one might also say that compared with the terrorof nuclear war between the US and USSR during the Cold War era, there are presently
no huge threats and the modern world has escaped from the danger of major disaster.
However, the fact that there is no clear object of fear is itself amplifying the present sense of
uncertainty. At the time this is being written (the end of November 2017), the world is facing
multiple unpredictable political risks including tensions regarding North Koreaʼs nuclear missile
program, developments in Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, and the outlook for the administrationof Angela Merkel in Germany. On the other hand, the global economy is favorable and stock
markets continue to post record highs. Does this mean that the worldʼs investors anticipate thatthe impact of such political risks will be limited, and that has resulted in such a situation? Orshould it be interpreted as an indication that investors are closing their eyes to political risks
and concentrating on financial speculation alone? The source of the anxiety today is that our
fundamental conceptual framework itself for understanding and interpreting the current situation
is being shaken. To quote the famous words of US President Franklin Rooseveltʼs inaugural
address, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Nevertheless, this undefined fear is whatmakes us most afraid.
One might say that at the root which has led to such global conditions lies an upheaval in the
post-war order, which has been the basis of the peace and prosperity that the world has enjoyed* This essay was originally published on Kokusai Mondai [International Affairs], No.668, Jan.–Feb. 2018.
Note: Parts of this essay include revisions to “Yū kai Suru Sengo Chitsujo no Raireki to Kadai” [History andIssues of the Dissolving Post-war Order], Journal of the Research Bureau (Secretariat of the House of Representatives), No. 14 (Dec. 2017), pp. 1–8.
** Hiroshi Nakanishi is a professor in the Law Department at Kyoto University.

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for more than 70 years. We have a tendency to focus on particular individuals and phenomena
such as the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union (EU), the election of
President Trump, and the North Korean nuclear missile tests. However, distinctive individuals
and events are the signs̶in other words, the superstructure̶of changes that are both structuraland long-term. In this paper, I present an overview of the trajectory of changes in the post-war
order, and also touch on issues in Japanese diplomacy.

1. Histor y of the Post-war Order
The framework of the present international order was formed during and just after the end of
WWII. At its core are universal international institutions such as the United Nations and the
Bretton Woods institutions. Following two world wars, which caused tens of millions of casualties
during the first half of the 20th centur y, as well as the horrors of the development and useof nuclear weapons toward the end of WWII by a project which gathered the best of modern
science, humanity has spent more than 70 years without experiencing large-scale war.
So, from a long-term perspective, one might conclude that the continued peace brought
about by the post-war international order was actually founded on the long-term and large-scale
destruction and violence experienced prior to that time. Then, why did such destruction andviolence occur? One interpretation is that the changes sparked by the Industrial Revolution,
which developed full-scale from 19th century Europe, had burst apart the 19th century order, andthat these horrors occurred in the process of seeking a new equilibrium.

(1) Formation of the post-war order
From the 19th century forward, the Industrial Revolution promoted industrialization throughout
the world. Industrialization brought multiple huge changes to human society. These changes may
be summarized as (1) a dramatic increase in production capacity, (2) an expansion of the stateʼsadministrative ability to control society, (3) a rapid increase in population, and (4) the diffusion of
power from Europe to the rest of the world.
From the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century, these changes
created nations with robust state bureaucratic systems, including large-scale military forces, inthe advanced nations where industrialization had progressed, and also rapidly deepened crossborder exchange. Meanwhile, the empires of the Qing Dynasty, Spain, Ottoman Turkey, British
India, and Russia, which had ruled over most of non-European world up until that time, could
not bear militar y rivalr y with and economic penetration by the advanced nations which had
industrialized, and they gradually weakened.
Such changes led to the wars such as the First Sino-Japanese War, the Spanish-America War,and the Boer Wars, as well as the revolutions and anti-government movements such as the First
Russian Revolution, the Young Turk Revolution, the Xinhai Revolution, and self-government by
the Indian National Congress. In WWI, a terrorist incident in the Balkans at the border of theweakened Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires triggered war among European industrializedcountries, and eventually spread into a global war in which Japan and the US also participated.
The Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires were forced to collapse one after
another.
After WWI, efforts were made to restore the international order with the formation of the
League of Nations and the reconstructed gold standard, but with the beginning of the Great
Depression (1929), the capitalist economies led by the US and the UK were at the brink offailure. The USSR and fascist nations adopted planned economies or controlled economies, andthe acceptance of market intervention by the state rose in the free market countries as well. In
the course of political and economic crises, the advanced nations proceeded along the path tobecoming administrative states with large-scale bureaucratic organs responsible for wide-ranging
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Hiroshi Nakanishifunctions such as national security and social security, and with the tax collection systems to
support them.
WWII provided another opportunity, especially for both the US and the UK, to shape a newinternational order. As presented in the Atlantic Charter, which was issued in August 1941, thatinternational order was fundamentally one to pursue liberal ideals. Having said that, national
power was also emphasized to facilitate the achievement of those liberal ideals and to upholdthem. The solid foundations of the post-war international order were established by combining
liberal ideals with practical elements of power.
Specifically, the post-war order had four main pillars. The first was the realization of the“politics of productivity” (Charles Maier), which enabled both industrialization and stable populargovernment. The second was the founding of a universalistic United Nations with mechanisms forthe great powers to maintain the international order. The third was the multilateral free trading
system, which mostly promotes trade in industrial products. And the fourth was a progressivism
that affirms industrial civilization, along with a sharing of anti-war sentiment transcending regions
and systems, based on the tens of millions of victims of the two world wars.
These four pillars underwent revisions as the Cold War began and the advanced industrialized
world was split into the two camps of East and West shortly after the end of WWII. The security
order was mainly maintained by mutual restraint between the two camps rather than bycollaboration among the great powers, and the free trade system was shared exclusively among
Western industrialized nations as a hegemonic framework for which the US carried the burden.
Regardless, through the early 1970s, these four pillars continued functioning to a substantial
extent as the basic framework of the international order.
Japan, which was defeated in WWII, also walked the path to reconstruction within this postwar order. Japan lost its regional hegemony in Asia and its militar y, but the Western open
economic system resolved the lack of resources and markets that had troubled pre-war Japan as a
newly industrializing country. Japan was able to advance rapid industrialization under this system.
With the “politics of productivity” as the foundation, Japan was also able to construct the stable
political framework known as the “1955 System.”On the other hand, Japanese foreign policy was facing two issues up until the early 1970s. The
first concerned Japanʼs security policy. Under the Constitution of Japan enacted just after the war,
the security of Japan, as a former enemy nation, was prescribed assuming it was under the controlof the United Nations. In the subsequent transition to the Cold War regime, however, Japan
accepted US forces as an ally, concluded the Japan-US Security Treaty, and began rearmament
within certain limits without revising its Constitution. This torsion did not generate any specificproblems as long as the mutual deterrence structure between East and West avoided actual wars
among the industrial powers, but a fundamental vagueness remained in Japanʼs national security
structure.
The second issue was that the post-war Asian region became the focus not only of the Cold
War regime, but also of decolonialization, which was another global-scale transformation. While
Japan positioned itself as “a member of Asia,” an interaction between the Cold War and postdecolonization politics prevented Japan from establishing formal relations with divided China
and Korea, with which it had deep ties as former war theaters and colonies, were postponed. As aresult, the emphasis of Japanʼs foreign policy was placed overwhelmingly on its relations with the
US, Europe and their post-colonies.

(2) Changes in the post-war order
The post-war order reached a turning point in the 1970s. While the industrialized nations were
suffering from skyrocketing resources prices, reduced economic growth rates, high inflation, andrising unemployment, the East-West framework of the Cold War could no longer grasp the whole
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Turbulence in the Post-war Order and Issues in Japanese Diplomacy

of international politics, including changes such as an intensification of the North-South divideand shifting relations among the US, China, and the USSR.
The basis of these changes was the undercurrent that subsequently came to be called
globalization, that is, technological advances made it possible for various actors in society togreatly amplify their capabilities, and the quality and quantity of transnational activities rapidly
expanded. Such phenomena had begun gradually progressing from the 1960s. While advancesin transportation and telecommunications technologies enabled the movement of people, goods,
and money eluding the net of government regulations, new communication networks, suchtechnological developments also awakened an awareness of identity based on ethnicity andreligion. One might say that the strengthening domestic solidarity and increased cross-borderinterdependence which had progressed centered on the state from the 19th century through thefirst half of the 20th century emerged at this time with a focus on social actors.
Yet, in the 1970s, the Cold War framework was still steadfast, and the Western capitalist
nations were able to maintain solidarity. The Western countries stepped up their vigilance over
the advance of the USSR and other communist countries such as Cuba into developing nations,and collaborated to strengthen defense capabilities and maintain free trade to avert protectionism
and division into bloc economies.
Then from the 1980s, new political coalitions that would lead the West were formed in the US
and the UK. In contrast to the liberal and Labour Party forces that had led politics since the endof the war, political conservatism and market-oriented liberalism fused into new political alliances
which attacked large government, labor unions, and other vested interests. US President Ronald
Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher brought together conser vative politicalalliances while also establishing market-oriented economic policies.
In this way, the post-war order was maintained, overcoming the crisis of the 1970s.
Nevertheless, the post-war Cold War framework was weakened. The mutual deterrence between
East and West by nuclear weapons morphed into competition in high-tech weapons, and theconfrontation between capitalism and socialism, which shared industrial civilization, turned intoa moral battle of good against evil between democracy and despotism. The deregulation line ledby the US and the UK transformed into a globalization policy of removing all economic barriers
from free trade centered on the manufacturing industry, and as the relocation of manufacturing
overseas advanced, the stable middle class and organized interest groups such as industrial
societies or trade unions gradually broke down, and the trend whereby public relations and image
strategies determine election results intensified. Manufacturing firms relocated to developing
countries, which had started moving away from their former closed development policies andbegun adopting market economy policies, and rapid industrialization was achieved in the East
Asian countries, in particular.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union in 1985, eased the USSRʼs tense foreign relations and worked toward the revitalization ofits domestic society. He achieved some measure of success at the former, but failed at the latter,
which ultimately brought about the separation of Eastern Europe from the Communist Bloc aswell as the eventual dissolution of the USSR and its withdrawal from communism. In foreign
relations, his “new thinking” diplomacy eased East-West tensions and was well received, but thedomestic revolution became frustrated, and ultimately this approach allowed Eastern Europe toabandon communism, leading to an attempted coup dʼétat by communist party members and thecollapse of the USSR. In a nutshell, , whose efforts ultimately failed
As the Cold War was coming to an end, when Saddam Hussein of Iraq attempted to annex
Kuwait by force, miscalculating the US reaction, the US and USSR collaborated to confront thisby restoring the pre-Cold War UN collective security mechanism, and the multilateral forces
dispatched based on a UN Security Council resolution won an overwhelming victory with the full
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Hiroshi Nakanishi

use of US high-tech weaponry. The images of the war broadcast live across the globe gave theimpression that the liberal international order originally conceived in the aftermath of WWII had
been realized under US initiative. While happenstance, it was also symbolic that it was President
George H.W. Bush, the last president to have fought in WWII, who proclaimed “a new worldorder.”
During this period, Japanese diplomacy followed a path of growth and setbacks. Fromthe 1960s through the 1970s, Japan had overcome its prior restraints for the time being andconstructed a foreign policy framework as the second largest economy in the free world. First,
this was a comprehensive security policy whereby, while keeping self-defense capabilities withina certain range, economic influence was used as a means for diplomatic security policy for the
purposes of international cooperation and development assistance, instead of linking economic
power to building up militar y capabilities overseas. Second, it succeeded in setting Japan ʼsrelations with Asian countries including China and South Korea, with economic relations as thefoundation, and promoted Asia-Pacific regionalism by combining free trade among advanced
nations around the Pacific rim with development assistance to Asian countries. These became
systematic during the Masayoshi Ōhira administration in the late 1970s, which called for PanPacific regional cooperation and established the Pacific Economic Cooperation Caucus (PECC) in1980. Based on this foundation, in the 1980s the administration of Yasuhiro Nakasone worked tosolidify Japanʼs ties with the West, reinforce the US-Japan security alliance, and improve relations
with China and South Korea, under the slogan of Japan as an “international state.”
However, the direction of such successes changed in the late 1980s when the Japanese
economy became bloated from an economic bubble and Japan became viewed as an outlier
mercantilist power by other Western countries. Moreover, in the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Gulf
War, Japan presented no clear policy on the potential use of force, and in the end could only share
the burden with a financial contribution of $13 billion. Coming on top of the collapse of the bubble
economy, this experience made Japan feel a deep sense of frustration and begin seeking reforms
to catch up with the new post-Cold War world order.

2. The Dissolving Post-War Order
However, expectations of the new world order rapidly fell by the wayside. Looking back today,
one cannot help but see the Western worldʼs euphoria and pride, as well as its failures. This
period gave rise to the two theses: Francis Fukuyamaʼs 1989 “The End of History?” and SamuelHuntingtonʼs “The Clash of Civilizations?”1 Reading these again today, while they naturally havesome defects because of the limitations of the times, one notes how the world, and the Westernworld in particular, failed to take seriously the warnings voiced by these two authors. While
stressing the victor y of liberal ideology, Fukuyama points out that contemporar y liberalism
is limited because of its inability to give people aspirations which transcend utilitarianism andeverydayness. Meanwhile, Huntington argues that while for the time being Western civilization
should work at reinforcing its own influence versus non-Western civilization, especially Confucian
and Islamic civilization, over the long term it is necessary to anticipate the emergence of nonWestern civilization, transcend cultural differences, and reach a deep understanding. Despite thedebates sparked by both of these essays, the West did not earnestly respond to such reservations
1

Francis Fukuyama, “The End of Histor y?” The National Interest, Vol. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18;
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Summer 1993),
pp. 22–49. Both of these papers were subsequently published as books: Francis Fukuyama (Shōichi
Watanabe trans.), Rekishi no Owari—Rekishi no “Shū ten” ni Tatsu Saigo no Ningen [The End of
History̶The Last Human Standing at the “Destination” of History] (Vols. 1 and 2), Mikasa Shobo, 1992
[original text 1992]; Samuel P. Huntington (Chikara Suzuki trans.), Bunmei no Shō totsu [The Clash of
Civilizations], Shueisha, 1998 [original 1996].

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Turbulence in the Post-war Order and Issues in Japanese Diplomacy

or warnings. The conditions today nearly 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which wallsthat separate people are being built in all parts of the world, including cyberspace, must be seenas the consequences of the complacency of the advocates of liberalism. More specifically, threefactors overlapped to gradually hollow out the post-war order from the inside, just as termites
destroy buildings by consuming their pillars.

(1) Emergence of a risk society

What manifested in the 1990s following the conclusion of the Cold War was the risk society2 that
accompanies globalization. While globalization greatly expanded the scope of activity of social
actors, by removing various boundaries and linking them as a network it also caused new risks
that had been buried during the Cold War era to emerge.
The rapid advance of identity politics was one of the sources of these risks. Throughexaminations of historical relics and records, the information technologies that enabled
globalization also made it possible for the masses to gain awareness of memories that had
been forgotten in the past. In contrast to the post-Cold War liberal world view which tended todeny a communitarian sense of belonging to certain groups, groups which rallied for particularethnicities and religious interpretations provided identity awareness and gained a strong ability tomobilize.
What is more, with the progress of globalization which made it possible for people, money,
goods, and information to move across national boundaries, society approached a complex system(chaos) of multifaceted spider web-like networks linking various and diverse factors. In complex
systems, local phenomena gain the potential to exert large-scale changes and influences going
beyond the range that can be controlled based on technological causal inference (the butterfly
effect). Such conditions were demonstrated time and again, as typified by the financial crisesof Black Monday (1987), the East Asian monetary crisis (1997), and the Lehman crisis (2008).
What is more, the power of entities which devote themselves to destroying the existing order at
the local level gained force relative to that of systems managers responsible for overall stability,
such as the major powers. Small-scale challenges and disruptions of order by terrorists and rogue
states came to cause risks for overall systems.3
In that sense, the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US were an epoch-making event.
A terrorist group using just the low-level technology of hijacking airplanes struck a blow in theheart of the US, which apparently took pride in being invincible. The psychological impact ofthese attacks was far greater than the physical damage.
Following the 9/11 attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush placed the “waron terror” at the center of US foreign policy, and not only invaded Afghanistan which had becomea base of Al-Qaeda and toppled the Taliban regime, but also designated Iraq, Iran, and North
Korea as the “axis of evil” and went to war to overthrow the government of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq. The administration of Tony Blair in the UK mediated in assembling cooperation from theinternational community for the “war on terror,” and ultimately exercised force together with the2This term is based on the concept suggested in Ulrich Beck (Ren Azuma and Midori Itō trans.), Kiken
Shaka—Atarashii Kindai e no Michi [Risk Society̶Towards a New Modernity], Hosei University
Press, 1998 [original 1986].

3

Early works which attempted to apply the concept of chaos to international politics include Yōnosuke
Nagai and Jitsuo Tsuchiyama (eds), Chitsujo to Konton (Chaos)—Reisengo no Sekai [Order and Chaos̶the Post-war World], Ningenno Kagakusha, 1993, and Robert Jer vis, System Ef fects: Complexity in
Political and Social Life, Princeton University Press, 1997. Talebʼs work stressed this concept once
again just before the Lehman crisis: Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Mamoru Mochizuki trans.), Black Swan—
Fukakujitsusei to Risk no Honshitsu [The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable] (Vols. 1
and 2), Diamond, Inc., 2009 [original 2007].

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Hiroshi Nakanishi

US.
Over tur ning the Hussein administration was easily achieved given the US militar ycapabilities. However, the failure to make any preparations for government after the collapse ofthat administration reflected the simple optimism of liberal democracy as the historical winner,and the US and UK which took the initiative in the war paid a high price for their excessively
optimistic outlook. The confusion of the post-war governance pulled down the internationalprestige of the US and UK, and insufficient attention was given to the development of nuclear
weapons by Iran and North Korea.
Because the burden of the “war on terror” turned out to be much heavier than initiallyanticipated, the Bush administration then had to give particular attention to upholding domestic
economic conditions. Because a real estate bubble had been tolerated and those loans wereturned into financial products, when the real estate bubble collapsed, that spread into a general
financial crisis. The emergence of the Lehman crisis in September 2008 reconfirmed the fragility
inherent in globalization.

(2) The rise of the rest

The “rise of the rest”4 progressed in parallel with the prolongation of the war on terror andconcerns about a global depression starting from the US caused by the collapse of Lehman
Brothers. A 2003 report by the largest US securities company Goldman Sachs used the term
“BRICs” to refer to Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and hinted at the potential that these countries
could surpass the industrialized nations in the future global economy, drawing a great deal ofattention.5 These four countries plus South Africa subsequently came to be called the BRICS, andvarious other terms were proposed to refer to the BRICS together with other emerging nations.
At that point in time, the West mostly viewed the emergence of the newly industrializing
economies not as a challenge to the international order, but rather as a demonstration that thecooperative framework would be maintained because these countries also benefitted from theopen order created by the West.6 To be certain, up until the 2008 Lehman shock, the basic policyin these countries as well was to pursue economic growth within the international order led by
the industrialized nations. For example, in the case of China, the administration of Hu Jintao
which came to power in 2002 initially called for a “peaceful rise” of China, and emphasized thestance that the emergence of the Chinese economy was not a threat to the existing order but was
rather in line with that framework.
Just after the 2008 Lehman crisis, there were growing calls for the industrialized nations andthe newly industrializing economies to reinforce the international cooperation framework withnew foundations. The strengthening of the G20 is a representative example. The G20 Summit
first held at the invitation of the US in November 2008 was made into a regular event. After thecrisis settled down somewhat, however, cracks emerged between the advanced nations and theemerging economies, and the stagnation of the G20 became conspicuous. The background to
this included a sense among the emerging economies that Western leadership was in decline asthey gained confidence in their own economic power, along with an emphasis on strengthening
authoritarian systems to avert domestic social discontent over growing economic disparities and4

Fareed Zakaria (Kōichi Nirei trans.), Amerika-go no Sekai [The Post-American World], Tokuma Shoten,
2008 [original 2008].

5

Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050,” Global
Economics, Paper No. 99 (Oct. 2003) [http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/archive/archivepdfs/brics-dream.pdf].

6

As a representative advocate, see G. John Ikenberr y (Yūichi Hosoya trans.), Riberaruna Chitsujo
ka Teikoku ka—Amerika to Sekai Seiji no Yukue [Liberal Order and Imperial Ambition: Essays on
American Power and International Order] (Vols. 1 and 2), Keiso Shobo, 2012 [original 2006].

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Turbulence in the Post-war Order and Issues in Japanese Diplomacy

over control over freedom of speech. Consequently, albeit only partially, the newly industrializing
countries began to make clear their critical stance toward the existing order led by the West.
The trends in China and Russia were particularly important. The Beijing Olympics were held
just before the Lehman crisis, and in China from this time there were growing calls among theleadership to switch from the line of “keeping a low profile and biding time” to a policy of actively“striving for achievement,” and a struggle for power emerged in relation to the succession of
power to Xi Jinping. Once Xi took power from 2012, China turned increasingly proactive in its
foreign policy. Under the banner of “the great revival of the Chinese nation,” while strengthening
its voice within the existing international economic order through such initiatives as including
the renminbi as one of the currencies that comprise International Monetary Fund (IMF) Special
Drawing Rights (SDR), China launched its “great maritime power” and “Belt and Road” initiatives,
established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and other wise began building up aframework to compete with the existing framework led by the West. Meanwhile, domestically,
the Chinese government tightened its stance toward controlling the spread of outside influence,and stepped up its control over free speech, which had been tolerated to some extent under thereform and opening-up policy.
Glorification of nationalism and regression of freedom have also proceeded in Russia under
the administration of Vladimir Putin, which has suppressed the opposition, placed the media
under control, and grasped the foundations of power of the siloviki (persons related to thesecurity or military services) and of energy and other industrial conglomerates. Furthermore, thePutin administration has strong suspicions regarding Western penetration of Russia and nearby
regions, and has taken stances opposing the West in its territorial dispute with Georgia (2008),
and in the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea (2014).
However, the newly emerging economies are not strongly united: India was absent from the2017 Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, and there is some overlap between
the Belt and Road initiative and the Eurasian Union advocated by President Putin. At least for
the time being, the effect from the rise of the newly emerging economies will likely be limited toeroding and weakening the post-war order, and the construction of an opposing order will not be
straightforwardly pursued.

(3) Decline in the political leadership of the democratic system
While the newly emerging economies began to distance themselves from the post-war order
led by the West, domestic politics were destabilized in the Western nations, especially in the
US and UK which had served as the core leaders of the post-war order, and their international
leadership declined. This trend, which had been noted just after the end of the Cold War7, rapidly
accelerated after the Lehman crisis. While the recurrence of a global depression has been
averted since the Lehman crisis by non-traditional financial policies and a large-scale expansionin fiscal spending, the fracturing of society has deepened over that time, and the political support
for anti-globalism can no longer be ignored. While the anti-globalism movement does not havea systematic world view, it does embody the sense of the downfall of the middle class, whichenjoyed prosperity during the period when the post-war order was fixed, and this movement has
also become mixed with a backlash against the elite who pushed globalization forward, animosity
toward immigrants, ethnic and religious chauvinism, and fear of terrorism. Although the majorityof people do not actively support anti-globalism, its influence in democratic politics is rising from7

A political analyst who proposed the “southern strategy” to the Republican Party in the past drew a
picture of the political deterioration of Anglo-Saxon society. See Kevin Phillips (Hisayoshi Ina trans.),
Amerika de “Kakumei” ga Okiru—Washinton Kaitai o Semaru Shin Popyurizumu [Arrogant Capital:
Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics], Nikkei Publishing, Inc., 1995
[original 1994].

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Hiroshi Nakanishi

its ability to mobilize politically since the use of social networking services (SNS) and other new
communications means outside the mass media has become widely available.
In 2016, such political changes brought about major shifts in the foreign policies of the US andthe UK, which had been in charge of the post-war order. Barack Obama, who became the first
black president of the US in 2009, declared that the US is not the worldʼs policeman, and pursued
a diplomacy without relying on militar y power and an emphasis on multilateral cooperation.
While Obamaʼs idealistic vision calling for a “world without nuclear weapons” had the power toappeal to public opinion, he failed to completely bridge the gap with China and Russia which
stepped up their challenges against the West and were becoming increasingly authoritarian, andwhile he did achieve the withdrawal of US combat units from Iraq, that invited the rise of theIslamic State (IS). Non-military response to the mountain of problems, including the governanceof Afghanistan, North Korean nuclear missile development, and Iraqi nuclear development, had
its limits and conversely led to a decline in international prestige and intensification of domestic
opposition. In the 2016 US presidential election, Hillary Clinton who inherited the Obama line
lost to Donald Trump who called for an America First policy, which implied destroying the postwar international order based on American liberal leadership. In the UK as well, Prime Minister
Tony Blair who had a middle-of-the-road line resigned amid criticism regarding the Iraq War.
The Labour Party lost its cohesiveness, and after the brief administration of Gordon Brown, thegovernment switched to the Conservative Party administration of David Cameron. However, inorder to achieve unity within his own party, Cameron rather capriciously proposed a nationalreferendum on Britain leaving the EU. To the shock of the British and the world, the “Leave” votenarrowly outnumbered the “Remain” vote in the referendum of June 2016.
The Brexit referendum under the Cameron administration and the selection of real estateagent Donald Trump as the Republican Party candidate and then as president revealed cracks
in the alliance between neoliberalism and conservative patriotism that had been central to US
and UK politics since the 1980s. Neoliberalism and conser vative patriotism had been united
under the great causes of criticizing the administrative state and confronting communism, but
after the end of the Cold War internal tensions intensified with a sense of the downfall of theconservative middle class and debates regarding war leadership. As a result of this split among
the conservatives, Prime Minister Cameron was forced into holding the Brexit referendum. whilein the US, the split within the Republican Party enabled the selection of Trump as the Republican
candidate. Of course, turmoil in domestic politics is not limited to the US and the UK: theemergence of anti-EU factions and separatist movements can be seen in other European countries
as well.
It should be possible to argue from a logical and utilitarian viewpoint against President
Trumpʼs assertions that the present international order places excessive burdens on the US,
allows free-riding by other countries, and harms US interests. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that
the US and the UK, and the US in particular, have borne an asymmetrical burden (admittedly
with certain privileges) in the post-war international order, and a utilitarian counterargument
based on profit-and-loss arithmetic will not resonate with the feelings of those who seek morethan utilitarian value. In addition to the emergence of the risk society and the rise of the newly
emerging economies, the post-war order is now being challenged from inside the states that have
served as its main axis. This is the greatest trial the post-war order has ever faced.

Conclusion
In this paper, I have reviewed the developments in the post-war order from its formation up
until the present time. Although the post-war order has provided peace and stability for morethan 70 years, its shaking is gradually growing stronger. The post-war order is a system thatwas conceived at the peak of industrial civilization, and there is no question that it has become
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Turbulence in the Post-war Order and Issues in Japanese Diplomacya presence which no longer matches the age of post-industrialization. The issue is whether thetransition to a new order will take place peacefully and gradually, or if we shift to a new order bypassing through devastating shocks including war. Of course, the former is clearly desirable, but
we cannot overlook the reality that this path is gradually narrowing.
Japan, which has received great benefits from the post-war order, has a particularly greatinterest in a peaceful transition. Even though Japan lacks the power to determine the fate of
the international order by itself, the decisions of Japan may have a large influence on important
aspects.
In that regard, what will be most important is the ability to make strategic judgments that
determine the allocation of limited resources. The environment surrounding Japan includes
potential conflict areas such as North Korea and the Taiwan Strait and is a region where US,
Chinese, and Russian influences intersect, and where it is becoming increasingly difficult toproject the future overall. Consequently, Japanʼs efforts to reinforce its security system should
be prioritized to enhance Japanʼs own safety and also as a means of diplomatic influence. Yet
considering the present level of the technologies, there are clearly limits to Japanʼs own resourcesthat can be devoted to defense, and Japan should allocate substantial resources to its diplomatic
capabilities and information collection and analysis capabilities. In particular, in this age of fakenews and conspiracy theories, accurate information analysis capabilities may determine the fateof nations.
Also, geopolitically, the Indo-Pacific region may gain importance as a region where US andChinese interests compete, and Japan may also need to build up its own network of influencein this region as well. That may require a dramatic expansion of people-to-people exchanges,
including the acceptance of immigrants from this region.
From a longer-term perspective, as the world transitions to an information civilization, thedecision on whether the unit that comprises a stable order will be the nation state or takes someother form is important. The modern nation state framework is presently the most rational anduniversal political order. Nevertheless, it is also certain that areas where the modern nation
state system, which is premised on the demarcation of strict national boundaries and on ethnic
integration, cannot be applied occupy a substantial part of the world. In the international orderthat will be formed from now, a choice will have to be made on whether to greatly reformthe nature of the 20th century nation state, or to find new principles of order that differ fromthe sovereign state, or to adopt some mixture of both. Even if the territory of Japan, which issurrounded by the sea, remains unchanged, the type of principles of order to be adopted will havedecisive importance on Japanʼs living environment.
Devising and implementing long-term strategies is an area where Japan has not been strong.
But if we do not deal with this issue amid the intensifying upheaval of the post-war order, thedanger that Japanʼs peace and prosperity may be lost will only grow stronger.

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Jitsuo Tsuchiyama

The Balance of Power in Korea, and Japan*
Jitsuo Tsuchiyama**

Abstract
This paper seeks to examine East Asia, particularly the situation surrounding North Korea,
from the perspective of power politics. It specifically points out that a balance of power, thekey concept in power politics, is an order that does not simply arise from maintaining abalance in military power but is in fact premised on a shared recognition among countriesof “national interests” and “systemic interests”. It goes on to contrast the case of Europe,
where the presence of these factors enabled power politics to take root, with the current
situation in East Asia, which lacks these factors despite the seeming emergence of power
politics in the region. The paper then explains the need for Japan – which at one point acted
as if it had quickly mastered the balance of power, leading to misjudgments that culminatedin tragedy – to consciously think and behave as a key actor in ways distinct from the past in
forming a regional order encompassing the Korean peninsula.

2018 marks 150 years since the Meiji Restoration: a period that at once may appear to be along time, and yet also prompts the thought: has it only been that long? Modern Japanʼshistor y is surprisingly short. Despite the shortness of its histor y, however, modern
Japanʼs diplomacy has been full of incident and turmoil, particularly in the prewar years.
Japan was the first non-European country to enter the European international order under its
own steam and join the great powers in their struggle for power and interests in East Asia. In theyears immediately following the Meiji Restoration, Japan sent a military expedition into Taiwan,
followed by the Sino-Japanese War, signed the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, was victorious in the
Russo-Japanese War, concluded the agreements with France and Russia, and annexed Korea. The
year after the outbreak of World War I, Japan issued the so-called Twenty-One Demands to China,
insisting on its interests in Shandong and Southern Manchuria. In this way, Japan transformed
itself into an empire with remarkable speed.
In the 1920s, Japan joined the League of Nations, established under the new ideal of collective
security, as a permanent member of its executive council, and became part of the Washington
order by signing the Washington Naval Treaty, marking Japanʼs arrival as one of the major powersof the international order. Ironically, however, World War I shattered the balance of power that
had been the foundation of that international order. The Russian Revolution took place during thewar, and the alliance with Britain and the agreements with France and Russia that had formed the
backbone of Japanʼs diplomacy were fatally undermined. Despite forming part of the core of theinternational order and despite seeming at first glance to have built a stable international position
for itself, Japanʼs diplomatic isolation had already begun at this time, as Paul Claudel, the Frenchambassador to Japan, remarked. In the years that followed, having boxed itself into an impossible
position, Japan launched itself into a war with the United States that led to the collapse and*This essay was originally published on Kokusai Mondai [International Affairs], No.670, Apr. 2018.

** Jitsuo Tsuchiyama is professor emeritus of Aoyama Gakuin University.

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The Balance of Power in Korea, and Japandestruction of its empire.1
After World War II, Japan seemed to reverse course and turn its back on power politics.
Certainly, the logic of the US-Japan Security Treaty system is closer to “bandwagoning” than abalance of power, and many overseas specialists on international politics regard Japanʼs postwar
diplomacy as a strategy of “hiding” in the shadow of the American superpower. For this reason,
they do not regard Japan as a major power. Even though Japan may be a member of the G7, forexample, Japan is not in charge of determining its own national security policy, and is therefore
regarded as a country that cannot achieve national security through its own power.
＊
Since the end of the Cold War, the focus of international politics has shifted from Europe to
East Asia. The reasons for this shift include the rapid emergence of Chinese power, North Koreaʼs
missile and nuclear development programs, together with the decline of Japanese influence andfailing trust in US foreign policy. The centenary of the outbreak of World War I four years ago
prompted some international relations theorists to predict a war between the United States andChina by way of analogy with World War I. Some drew on the “Thucydides Trap” to compare
the clash between the United States and China to the wars between Athens and Sparta. Thesearguments were based on a distorted understanding of the historical facts2, but one thing hadin common is that they all recognized the emergence of power politics in East Asia. Comparedto Europe, however, East Asia does not have the same diplomatic norms, systems, or, mostimportantly, experience necessary for managing power politics in a prudent and cautious manner.
Various things have the potential to control power: ethics, norms, public opinion, anddemocratic systems. But ultimately what controls power is power itself. Hans J. Morgenthau
wrote that the pursuit of power by states inevitably produces a balance of power.3 Some may
object that the debate has moved on since Morgenthau ʼ s time, but Kenneth N. Waltz also
argued that a balance of power is the only logic of international politics. Setting aside for now
the question of whether it is indeed the only logic, both these thinkers pointed out that when
the balance of power functioned, Europe was at peace (under the Vienna system), while war
broke out when it failed to function (World War I). Morgenthau argued that a balance of power
inevitably results, and Waltz also thought that a balance of power produced itself naturally. But
in fact, a balance of power does not simply happen: it is created. To create an international order(a pattern of behavior among states for maintaining basic objectives), requires ideals, rules, andframeworks. In modern Europe, those roles have been played by the balance of power. A balanceof power does not mean weighing the military might of various countries on a set of virtual scales
and achieving balance in that way. It means a series of negotiations and systems to determine
who can do what, and how far they can go.4 Accordingly, for a balance of power to function, states
must not only know the meaning of their own national interests, but must also understand the1

The question why Japan became an empire and then collapsed is a major subject in international
studies. Important works have been done by Jack Snyder and Charles A. Kupchan, among others,
who argue that the interests Japan gained from its empire in terms of diplomacy, national security, andeconomy did not match the costs.

2

See, for example, Chapters 7 and 8 of Richard N. Rosecrance and Steven E. Miller eds., The Next Great
War? The Roots of World War I and the Risk of U.S.-China Conflict, The MIT Press, 2015.

3

Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, (Vol. 2), Japanesetranslation Kokusai seiji – kenryoku to heiwa by Yoshihisa Hara, Iwanami Bunko, 2013, p. 16

4Tsuchiyama Jitsuo, Anzen hoshō no kokusai seiji-gaku: aseri to ogori (International Politics of Security:
Anxiety and Hubris) 2nd. ed., Yūhikaku, 2014, Chapter 11, “Balance of Power: Kokusai chitsujo keisei to
iji no jōken.”

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Jitsuo Tsuchiyama

interest to be gained from maintaining the international order, or what might be called systemicinterests. This requires not only shared common thinking and shared understanding of history
among the countries involved in the relationship, but also practice and experience at managing
international relations. The existence of a balance of power was a precondition for the formationof the European order that developed into an international system as the European powers
expanded their power around the world in the nineteenth century; this is the international orderthat we know today.
The extent to which countries outside Europe have adopted the European thinking on
international relations varies from one countr y and region to another, but probably nowhere
has learned the lessons as keenly as Japan after the arrival of Perr y ʼ s fleet. The stor y of
Sakamoto Ryōma carrying a book of international law in his pocket may be apocryphal, but itvividly illustrates the attitude of Japan to the outside world in the waning days of the Tokugawa
shogunate. Government (bakufu) officials closely followed developments in neighboring Qing
China, which had suffered defeat in the two Opium Wars, and in Russia, which had been defeatedin the Crimean War. From an early stage, Katsu Kaishū predicted that the present system ofgovernment could not hold, while Hashimoto Sanai, right-hand man of Matsudaira Yoshinaga,
head of Fukui domain in Echizen province, came up with a proposal for a unified state to take theplace of the feudal system. That the baku-han (Tokugawa Shogunate) system successfully opened
the country and implemented the Meiji Restoration less than 20 years after the arrival of Perryʼs
ships was thanks to the ability of the so-called enlightenment faction of bakufu officials like Kawaji
Toshiakira and Iwase Tadanari, and the heads of powerful domains like Shimazu Nariakira
and Matsudaira Yoshinaga to read one step ahead and see how events were developing. They
possessed realism̶the ability to see what they could do based on their power, interests, and thestrength of their support, and to understand how long they could hold on. This enabled them tocalculate their strength, formulate a policy, and produce the desired results.
＊
What can a balance-of-power perspective tell us about North Koreaʼs nuclear and missile
development programs, which currently threaten the East Asian and US security system? On thebalance of power and its relationship to small and medium-sized countries, Morgenthau wrotethat the only options for a small country were to adjust to the balance of power or to get on the
bandwagon of the dominance of a major power, citing Korea as an example. For more than 2000
years, Koreaʼs destiny has been determined either by the dominance of a country that controlled
Korea or by a balance of power among countries competing for control.5 There is no questionthat Morgenthauʼs arguments match the reality of countries like Poland, the Baltic states, orVietnam, which have frequently fallen victim to the great powers, or to the leaders of Japan in
the bakumatsu (last days of Tokgawa shogunate) era and the Meiji Restoration, who feared aninvasion by the European powers. For example, when Russia harbored its warship Posadnik in
Tsushima and looked to occupy the island, Katsu Kaishū used British power to drive Russia
away. After the Restoration, the Meiji government, having dispatched troops to Taiwan and
Korea, knew that Japan was not strong enough to match the powers, and sought instead to let
the powers compete among themselves and looked to profit in that way. The balance of powerin Asia between Britain, France, and Russia worked as a positive advantage for the opening
and independence of Japan as a small country. It would probably be an exaggeration to say thatbakumatsu and early Meiji Japan carried out balance of power diplomacy with the powers. Japan
at the time did not have a Metternich or Bismarck, and there was no system or history of any
5Morgenthau, op cit., p. 34

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The Balance of Power in Korea, and Japanbalance of power existed in Asia at the time. And although foreign policy decisions taken by theearly Meiji government̶the expedition to Taiwan, the Ganghwa Island incident, and ultimately
the Sino-Japanese War̶seem to be connected in retrospect, there was no grand design thatenvisaged taking these actions from the outset. Saigō Takamoriʼs advocacy of a punitive mission
against Korea (Seikanron) was not a strategic argument, and Yamagata Aritomo ʼ s “ line ofinterest,” learned from Lorenz von Stein, also looks like an after-the-fact argument to provide ajustification for Japanʼs decision to send troops into Korea.
Despite these various qualifications, however, it remains true that Japan was the sole actor
who understood the balance of power in East Asia, especially as it pertained to Korea. This
diplomatic sense was something possessed by Katsu Kaishū, by Itō Hirobumi in Meiji, and by
Fukuzawa Yukichi outside the government. Of course, Mutsu Munemitsu, a realist who was
Japanʼs foreign minister during the Sino-Japanese War, had it too. Not that Mutsu saw everything
clearly. The biggest setback of Mutsuʼs diplomatic career was the Triple Inter vention; thereason for this failure was a mistaken judgement of how much Japan could do̶that is to say,a mistaken understanding about the balance of power. In his diplomatic memoirs Kenkenroku,
Mutsu famously wrote “I should like to think that there was no other option,” but if Japan had not
demanded that China cede the Liaodong Peninsula in the treaty of Shimonoseki (peace treatyof the First Sino-Japanese War), it is conceivable that the vicious circle that later embroiled East
Asia might never have started. Japanʼs greed and fear of Russia led to the demand for Liaodong
Peninsula, and invited the Triple Intervention. But when Japan compromised and returned thepeninsula to Qing China, Russia started to extend its own power into the peninsula. Japan chose
the Anglo-Japanese Alliance over the Russo-Japanese agreement, leading to the Russo-Japanese
War and the annexation of Korea.
As Sarah C. Paine of the US Naval War College has written, one can see diplomacy in East
Asia in the period from the Sino-Japanese War to World War I as the history of the successes
and failures of Japanʼs balance of power diplomacy, with the focus always on Korea.6 As alreadynoted, however, this balance of power diplomacy was no longer functioning by the 1920s. The
next twenty years one bad decision led to another. After the Manchuria incident, Japan reacted to
criticism from the international community by quitting the League of Nations, then entered allout war with China following the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Isolated and without support, Japanwas driven to sign an alliance with Nazi Germany; when Germany declared war on the Soviet
Union, Japan seized the opportunity to “advance south,” prompting the United States to impose
economic sanctions. Japan responded by planning a sudden attack on Pearl Harbor and war with
the United States, with tragic consequences.
＊
There is a view that the collapse of the Japanese empire, rather than stabilizing the balance ofpower on the Korean peninsula, actually destroyed that balance of power, leading to the Korean
War that broke out five years later. The following year, Japan signed the US-Japan Security
Treaty, meaning that postwar Japan remained committed to the balance of power in Korea, albeit
in a different form from before the war. This is clear from an exchange of notes regarding UN
command in the first US-Japan Security Treaty, the secret Korean minutes acknowledged at thetime of the revision of the Security Treaty in 1960, the secret agreement on nuclear weapons
made at the US-Japan summit meeting in 1969, and in the guidelines for US-Japan defense
cooperation, among other things. There is an argument that the Yoshida Doctrine symbolizes
6

Sarah. C. M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War,
Cambridge University Press, 2017.

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Jitsuo Tsuchiyama

postwar Japanʼs retreat from power politics, but this argument neglects the reality that the burdenof supporting the peace and security of postwar Japan has been borne by places like Korea andOkinawa. The focus of the negotiations leading up to the Agreed Framework in 1994 and the Six
Party Talks that followed, and of all subsequent policies on North Korea, including the current
economic sanctions, has been to balance the risks and interests of the countries neighboring
the North, and to find a way to bring North Koreaʼs nuclear weapons and missile development
programs to an end.7 The essential thing is to ensure that North Korea does not miscalculatethat it can use the threat of the possibility of a nuclear attack by ballistic missiles to achieve its
strategic objectives.

7

Joel S. Wit, Daniel B. Poneman, and Robert L. Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear
Crisis, The Brooking Institution, 2004, is helpful in knowing the efforts of the Clinton administration to
respond to the situation.

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Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

The Free Trade System Facing the Threat of Collapse

The Free Trade System Facing the Threat of Collapse*
Shujiro Urata**

Abstract
Triggered by the United States imposing tariffs on Chinese imports and subsequently
China`s retaliatory action, the exchange of tariffs has escalated into a full-blown trade war
between the two countries in 2018. The United States is aiming to reduce or eradicate
its trade imbalance by using protectionist measures. There are two main reasons behindprotectionism in the United States. One is an attempt to secure jobs in certain sectors of
US industry. Another reason is the alarm it feels in the face of Chinaʼs rapid development
in information technology (IT) and other areas of advanced technology. The latter concern
is shared by many members of the US Congress and business leaders, and this makes it
possible that measures against China may continue long beyond the Trump presidency.
I propose three options that the rest of the world can take in these circumstances topersuade the United States to return to a rule-based free trade system: (1) a possible U-turnin US policy would be brought about by the increasing severity of the negative impact ofprotectionist measures on the US economy itself; (2) the worldʼs major economies̶Japan,
the EU, China, and so on̶to work toward comprehensive and liberal regional integration
without the United States on trade and investment, and thus push the United States intoa disadvantageous position; and (3) countries that share interests in common, like Japanand the EU, to involve the United States in efforts to reform the World Trade Organization(WTO).

Protectionism and the Outbreak of a US-China Trade WarI

n March 2018, US President Donald Trump imposed additional tariffs on imports of steel(25%) and aluminum (10%), based on Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act (national
security). He is currently considering imposing additional tariffs on motor vehicle imports.
Meanwhile, in July 2018, citing infringements of intellectual property, he used Section
301 of the 1974 Trade Act (unfair trading practices on the part of a foreign government) to slap
tariffs (25%) on Chinese imports worth ＄34 billion. China retaliated by imposing tariffs (25%)
of its own on imports from the United States to the same amount. Riled by Chinaʼs retaliatory
action, the United States imposed further tariffs on Chinese imports worth $16 billion in August,prompting China to retaliate by slapping additional tariffs on US imports worth the same amount.
In September, the United States and China both implemented a third round of tariffs. The UnitedStates slapped tariffs on $200 billion worth of imports from China, while China imposed tariffs on
US imports worth $60 billion. Following these three rounds of tariffs, the total value of affected
US imports from China is around $250 billion; around $110 billion of Chinese imports from theUnited States are affected by Chinese tariffs. This is equivalent to roughly half of all US imports*

This essay was originally published on Kokusai Mondai [International Affairs], No.677, Dec. 2018.

** Shujiro Urata is Professor of Economics at Graduate School Asia-Pacific Studies, Waseda University.

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Shujiro Urata

from China, and approximately 85% of the goods that China imports from the United States on avalue basis. The exchange of tariffs has escalated into a full-blown trade war between the UnitedStates and China.
In addition to the trade war it started with China, the United States is aiming to reduceor eliminate its trade imbalance by using protectionist measures through bilateral talks withcountries with which the United States has a trade deficit. These policies are based on the ideathat a trade imbalance indicates an excess of imports over exports, and that this leads to aloss of American jobs. The United States has renegotiated the US-Korea (KORUS) Free Trade
Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada,
in both cases to the advantage of the United States. In the revised version of the US-Korea Free
Trade Agreement, for example, the United States successfully extended the tariff on Koreanmade pickup trucks (25%), due to be scrapped on January 1, 2021, until January 1, 2041. Basedon the assumption that they meet Korean safety standards so long as they meet US federal safety
standards, the revisions also doubled the number of vehicles each auto company can export toKorea, , from 25,000 to 50,000 a year. As a condition for removing tariffs on vehicles, the revisions
to NAFTA require cars imported from another NAFTA country to contain 75 percent made-inNAFTA components, up from the current 62.5 percent within three years. The revisions also
allow tariffs to be imposed on any vehicles imported from Mexico or Canada after an exemption
for the first 2.6 million vehicles a year. Negotiations with the European Union and Japan are still
to take place, but it is clear that the United States will seek to revise agreements in its favor bythreatening to use protectionist measures, including raised tariffs on automobiles and othermeans.
This frequent resort to protectionist measures by the United States has brought about acrisis in the free trade system that was constructed under American leadership and drove therapid growth of the global economy; this system now faces the threat of collapse. However, it isimportant to remember that protectionism is not limited to the United States; there is a growing
tendency toward such measures in other countries as well, though it is not as great as in the US.

The background to protectionism: saving jobs, standing up to China
There are two main factors behind protectionism in the United States. One is an attempt to securejobs in certain sectors of US industry. Since the election campaign, President Trump has argued
that growing imports and direct foreign investment by US firms lead to fewer job opportunities
for American workers, and that protectionist measures are necessary to protect jobs by limiting
imports and foreign direct investment. Specifically, he has argued that it is necessary to limit
imports to be able to protect jobs in heavy industries like steel and automobiles, concentrated
in the “rust belt” of the Midwest. He has also espoused protectionism and anti-globalization asa means of criticizing the establishment, made up of the Washington politicians and New Yorkbusiness elites who have pushed the trend toward globalization through the expansion of tradeand investment. Workers and other voters who responded to arguments like this from Trump as
a candidate played a large role in winning him the presidency; by activating Section 232 of theTrade Expansion Act after taking office, Trump has moved to fulfill his campaign pledges and put
them into action.
Another reason for US protectionism is the alarm it feels in the face of China ʼ s rapid
development in information technology (IT) and other areas of advanced technology. To achieve
the “Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” China has set a target tobecome a global economic, military, and cultural superpower alongside the United States by thetime of the centenary of the founding of the Peopleʼs Republic in 2049. On economic front, it haslaunched the Made in China 2025 industrial policy with the aim of becoming a manufacturing
superpower, and is promoting a strategy built around development of cutting-edge technology. It
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The Free Trade System Facing the Threat of Collapse

is also working on construction of a China-centered economic sphere by implementing the Beltand Road Initiative. The United States sees Chinaʼs system of state-run capitalism as a challenge
to the American-led free trade system, and is seeking to shift the direction of Chinaʼs policy
through protectionist measures, in order to prevent China from achieving policies and strategies
that challenge the United States. Specifically, it is demanding an end to intellectual property
infringements by Chinese companies, forced technology transfers from foreign companies
investing in China, and other unfair practices.

The impact of protectionism: economic downturn
The impact of the trade war between the United States and China is already being felt in a
reduction in trade volume, increasing import prices and domestic prices within the importing
country on which tariffs were imposed, and falling export prices in the exporting country. We
can expect a drop-off in production and consumption in response to these changes in price.
At present, the US economy is doing well, as President Trumpʼs policies of tax cuts, increased
government spending, and deregulation have their effects, and this is having a positive effect inother economies. However, the impact of these stimulus policies is expected to wane from the
beginning of 2019. If the negative economic aspects of protectionism come to the surface in suchcircumstances, this would likely have serious repercussions not only on the two countries directly
involved but on the entire global economy. Today, when countries around the world are closely
linked by trade and investment and the global value chain, the negative economic effects ofprotectionism would be felt throughout the world. Analysis by the International Monetary Fundsuggests that a trade war between the United States and China could depress economic growth
rates for 2019 by up to 0.9 percent for the United States and China and by up to 0.7 percent for the
global economy as a whole.
Will the United States attain its desired objectives through its protectionist measures,canceling out bilateral trade imbalances, reviving the protected industries and saving jobs, andputting an end to Chinaʼs unfair practices? It seems unlikely. Although tariffs might help toimprove bilateral trade figures, it is likely to lead to a trade deficit with other countries, and will
therefore not help to increase employment in the United States. On the relationship between
trade and employment, the consensus view in economics is what is important is not simply thebilateral trade balance with particular trading partners but the balance of trade with the world asa whole. Protectionist policies are not an effective way of improving the trade balance with theworld, and macroeconomic measures relating to exchange rates, fiscal and monetary policies
are necessar y. Experience teaches that revitalizing industr y and saving jobs by protectionist
measures is extremely difficult.
The US steel industr y was the source of trade frictions with Japan and other countries
from the 1970s to the 1990s, owing to an increase in imports. The United States responded bydemanding voluntary export restraints and introducing the trigger price mechanism (introduced
in 1978 to guarantee a minimum price for imported steel goods with the aim of preventing a
sharp increase in steel imports), and has used these measures to protect its steel and relatedindustries with the aim revitalizing these industries. These hopes have not been met and now theadministration has resorted to tariffs. But to revitalize an industry that has lost competitiveness,
what is needed is not protectionism but a free market environment unbound by red tape that will
facilitate improvement of workersʼ skills and the introduction of new technology.
Protectionist measures that impose additional tariffs on materials like steel and aluminum canbe particularly harmful. It is necessary to recognize that tariffs raise prices, which has a knock-on
effect on the price of automobiles and other products made from these raw materials. Consumers
are not the only ones to suffer as a result. The impact on companies can be severe, as exports
become less competitive and sales and production volumes fall. Tariffs end up causing industrial
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Shujiro Urata

stagnation and decline̶precisely the opposite effects from those they were intended to have. In
order to address Chinaʼs unfair practices, it would be more effective for the United States to act inpartnership with the EU and Japan, which face similar problems.

How to maintain the free trade system: mega-FTAs and reforms of the WTO
By unilaterally imposing protectionist measures against China, which is the second largest
economy in the world, the United States, the largest economy, has brought about a trade war
between the two countries. This threatens the survival of the global free trade system and ishaving a serious impact on the entire global economy. Since the use of protectionist measures
to protect jobs reflects the personal views of President Trump, it is possible that these policies
will be abandoned when his time in office comes to an end. But Trump is not the only influential
figure in the United States who is concerned at Chinaʼs rise. This sense of alarm is sharedby many members of the US Congress and business leaders, and this makes it possible thatmeasures against China may continue long beyond the Trump presidency. What steps can therest of the world take in these circumstances to persuade the United States to return to a rulebased free trade system? I believe that at least three options are possible, as outlined below.
The first does not require any new policies to be taken but rather involves a possible U-turnin US policy brought about by the increasing severity of the negative impact of protectionist
measures on the US economy. If protectionist trade policies are applied in the long term, this will
seriously affect the US economy through increasing prices of imported goods and decreasing
exports and production. If the outlook becomes bleak, the effect of the economic downturn willbe amplified through a fall in stock prices. If the negative impact of protectionist measures makes
itself felt in this way, then President Trump may decide to withdraw some of the measures. But
the economic circumstances would have to be quite serious to persuade President Trump to shift
his policy, and in this case the global economy would also suffer serious damage. This makes this
scenario the worst-case scenario of the three possibilities.
The second approach, which has some aspects in common with the first, would be for theworldʼs major economies̶Japan, the EU, China, and so on̶to work toward comprehensive
and liberal regional integration without the United States on trade and investment, and thus
push the United States into a disadvantageous position. If the US business elite truly felt thatthey were suffering a discriminatory and unfavorable position by being excluded, it is likely thatthey would demand President Trump to negotiate a place at the table for the United States. Thismight be attained by ensuring that the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for TransPacific Partnership (CPTPP), signed by the remaining 11 countries after the United States quit
the original TPP agreement, becomes fully implemented quickly and attracts new members.
Similarly, efforts should be made to broaden the membership of the recently enacted economic
partnership agreement between Japan and the EU, and to reach agreement and ratification of theRegional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), including India and China, as quickly as
possible.
The third would be for countries that share interests in common, like Japan and the EU, to
involve the United States in efforts to reform the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is
responsible for maintaining the present world trade order and is beset by problems. In fact, thismovement is already underway, and agreement has been reached at meetings between headsof government and trade ministers from Japan, the US, and the EU on the need for effective
enforcement of trade rules and commitments, improvements to the WTOʼs monitoring anddispute resolution functions, and the establishment of rules for the increasingly important new
field of digital technology. If these efforts progress, it may become possible to curb Chinaʼs
unfair practices, easing US distrust of China, and possibly leading to a reduction in protectionist
measures.
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Japan Review Vol.2 No.4 Spring 2019

Report: History, Psychology, and the Rule of Law in East Asian Security

Report:History, Psychology, and the Rule of Law in East Asian Security
Lecture by Professor David Welch*

Abstract
On December 18, 2018, the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA) invited Professor
David Welch to hold a workshop on the rule of law and the Asian regional order entitled“Histor y, Psychology, and the Rule of Law in East Asian Security.” The following is asynopsis of the event.

T

he security environment of East Asia is now unstable. To manage the situation andchallenges that East Asia is facing, Professor Welch stressed the importance of therule of law and of understanding the psychological aspects of the behavior of countries
in and around East Asia. The lecture was insightful because of its use of psychology to
explain international politics, which tends to place emphasis on power politics.

The Asian Security Environment
Professor Welch opened his lecture with a thoughtful analysis of the security environment in East
Asia by focusing on the leaders of key countries that have an influence on the regional balance ofpower and order. To begin with, Welch stressed that East Asia is currently full of uncertainty andinstability, and Donald Trump is the number one reason for that. Trump is unwittingly doing his
best to undermine the liberal international order that the United States helped create after WorldWar II, and on which American security and influence depends.
Welch went on to talk about East Asian leaders such as Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jong-un ofNorth Korea, Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, and Shinzo Abe of Japan. According to Welch, Xi Jinpingʼs
China is not an expansionist power, but it is a country that wants to be respected as a great power.
A big part of Chinese foreign policy these days focuses on controlling what other people say andthink about China and Chinese policy, which is evidence of Chinaʼs sense of vulnerability andinsecurity.
There are two broad ways to interpret North Koreaʼs Kim Jong-un, though Welch admitted
he does not fully understand Kim. One possibility is that Kim is an unambitious, status quo
autocrat like his father. If all Kim wants is to maintain the independence of North Korea, he is notnecessarily a big international problem. The other possibility is that Kim is an ambitious leader
who thinks having a nuclear capability is necessary for North Korean survival and doesnʼt want togive up nuclear weapons.
However, as Welch noted, there is no sign that North Korea will ever seriously attemptdenuclearization. Kim might therefore be a manageable problem, but there is another possibility,
which is that he is very ambitious and seeks to succeed where his god-like grandfather failed:namely, in reunifying Korea under Kim family rule. Welch expressed concern that Kim may
eventually suffer from delusions of invincibility, because dictators who enjoy absolute power and*David Welch is Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo.

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David Welch

are worshipped for extended periods of time can lose the capacity for rational judgment and do
things that may seem irrational.
Welch said Taiwanʼs Tsai Ing-wen was doing a good job by not crossing the red lines thatwould trigger aggressive action from China. He expressed his opinion that the relationshipbetween China and Taiwan is the number one long-term problem in East Asia. Welch was
generally dismissive of President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, except to note that he madeit easy for China to save face when the Philippines won their South China Sea arbitration tribunal
dispute.
In his analysis of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Welch noted that it is natural for acountry such as Japan that faces a very uncertain security environment in East Asia to increase
its capabilities to deal with its own security challenges. However, what makes Japan an unusual
country is that there is domestic opposition to increasing defense capabilities, and Abe has tomake adjustments for this. Considering the unusual situation in Japan, Welch noted that it makes
complete sense for Japan to emphasize the importance of the rule of law, and Japanʼs vision of a“Free and Open Indo-Pacific” was an articulation of this emphasis.

Four Different Concepts for Analysis and Their Relationship to Each Other
Welch introduced four concepts that help us analyze the security environment in East Asia: therule of law, history, politics, and psychology. The rule of law was the main concept that Welch
focused on in his lecture, and he stressed we have to understand how it relates to psychology,
history and politics. Starting from the rule of law, Welch explained the implications of each of theconcepts on the others, and explored the usefulness of this framework by looking at the case of
the South China Sea.

<History>
Histor y is vitally important in legal disputes over territorial sovereignty. Not surprisingly, allclaimants in the South China Sea offer historical narratives to back up their claims. Unfortunately,
the historical record is not clear enough to sustain any particular set of claims. History plays
a very minor and peripheral role in legal arguments over maritime jurisdiction in view of thefact that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) swept aside all prior customary
maritime law, replacing it with an agreed body of positive law. That China relies so strongly on
historical arguments in the South China Sea is interesting, for two reasons: first, because theycannot establish maritime rights; and second, because China insists upon resolving disputes
through negotiation. Historical claims play no role in negotiation.

<Politics>
Whenever there is a hot topic, there is a domestic political angle and an international politicalangle, and these angles interact with each other. Even authoritarian states have to be responsive
to domestic opinion. Therefore, when we are dealing with maritime and territorial disputes, weare basically trying to address both a domestic and an international audience at the same time.

<Psychology>
There are at least four insights from psychology that help us understand the rigidity andemotional valence of claims in the South China Sea.
Cognitive psychology tells us that beliefs are terribly important. We all have sets of beliefs(“schemas”) about the world that we use to interpret new information. Schema theory shows usthat we easily form new beliefs without much evidence, but demand a much higher standard ofevidence for changing a belief once it is formed. There are two main schools of thought about
the way people change their beliefs. One says it takes a long list of events that are inconsistent
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Report: History, Psychology, and the Rule of Law in East Asian Security

with your beliefs before you start to change your beliefs. The other school of thought says a big
disaster is adequate; if you experience a serious failure, that will force you to change your beliefs.
Another part of the psychology of disputes is what is known as the fundamental attribution
error. If somebody we donʼt like does something we donʼt like, we tend to attribute it to theircharacter. This is in contrast to behavior we donʼt like by people we like, which we generally
attribute to situational constraints.
We can find still another psychological tendency that helps us understand things: egocentricbias. When people do things we donʼt like, we tend to think theyʼre directed specifically at us.
The last factor is the justice motive. When our sense of justice is triggered, we tend to become
hysterical, and demand absolute satisfaction of our rights.

Conclusion
Welch concluded that historical disputes may trigger bad psychological dynamics, which thentrigger domestic and international political challenges. We then get feedback loops between
historical narratives and the psychology of politics.
However, when we introduce law into this loop, historical disputes tend to be calmed downby the dialog between law and history. Law is a magic ingredient for helping take history out ofthe picture and calming down the political and psychological dimensions of disputes, according
to Welch. In the long run, then, the best hope for solutions to disputes in the South China Sea
is to give claimants time to internalize legal judgments of the kind handed down in 2016 by thePermanent Court of Arbitration in the case of Philippines v. China. There are encouraging signs
that this is already beginning to happen.

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