Softly,softly to Iraq: Removing the inverted commas from Japan's security contributions

This article considers the Japanese Government's decision to send self-defence force personnel to Iraq 'for humanitarian assistance' as a basis for examining the tensions between expectations and aspirations of Japan's security identity. The deployment presents us with an opportunity to examine prevailing assumptions about international security and what it means for Japan's international 'contributions'. The article seeks to explore the theoretical constructs and practical constraints which foster the tension between those who expect Japan's military capability to be equal to its economic status (that is, a 'normal power') and those who champion Japan's 'comprehensive security' position as a long-standing alternative security interpretation. The article acknowledges that while the deployment may well represent the very limits of constitutional interpretations of the famous Article 9 (or peace clause), it also presents an option which ought to withstand ongoing international and domestic pressures to revise the 1947 Constitution.     

Japan's response to China's rise: regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post‐Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan–China–US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a ‘concert of democracies’ involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values‐based diplomacy to check the so‐called ‘Beijing consensus’. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision.     

The Specter of Revolution: Reconsidering Japan's Decision to Surrender

Existing studies of the Pacific War tend to focus on the adverse military situation in explaining Japan's decision to surrender. Special emphasis has been placed on both the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet entry into the war. Although these are no doubt critical to understanding the end of the Pacific War, they fail to tell the whole story. This paper seeks to broaden the scope of the scholarly debate by focusing on Japan's domestic situation as a major factor behind the decision to surrender. It argues that a near-obsessive fear of social revolution among Japan's conservative ruling elite played an important role in prompting Japanese elites to make the decision to end the war.     

Transposition in Japanese state identities: overseas troop dispatches and the emergence of a humanitarian power?

This article aims to illustrate the trajectory of Japan's security identity transposition. As one of the catalysts in identity transposition, it focuses on the constitutive roles of norms regulating Japan's overseas dispatches of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). Whilst keeping the identities of ‘a peace state’ and ‘a civilian power’, the authors argue that Japan has crafted a new security identity after the end of the cold war and the 9/11 terrorist attacks—namely, ‘an international humanitarian power’. As evidence of this transposition, the authors illustrate a dramatic increase in the number of overseas SDF dispatches on humanitarian missions, and the shift of domestic and foreign responses to it. The authors note that Japan has been on the road to remilitarisation and internationalisation during the past four decades through the enactments of laws for overseas SDF dispatches, the general public's shift of attitude on the SDF's roles, the evolution of the alliance in a more operational direction, and the creation of threats from North Korea and China. Lastly, the authors argue that there is still a long way to go before Japan emerges as a normal state because of the presence of many domestic and structural barriers, especially multiple identities defining the Japanese state.     

Not-so-new silk roads: Japan's foreign policies on Asian connectivity infrastructure under the radar

Scholarly narratives concerning China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) tend to contextualise this project within China's rivalry with the United States and Japan. Such interpretations often reduce and misconstrue Japan's initiatives in Asian infrastructure finance as mere reactivity to China's advances. This paper will showcase Japan's own foreign and financial policies regarding infrastructure in Asia and the New Silk Road regions since the end of the Cold War. I argue that Japan's presence in that field is underappreciated and under-researched, as Japan's infrastructural footprint in the New Silk Road significantly pre-dates the BRI. Furthermore, I stress the fact that Japan's foreign policy in Asian infrastructure finance featured important cooperative postures toward China, especially within multilateral development banks. The paper makes a contribution to emerging scholarship on the BRI—often reliant on strategic communications and projections—by highlighting Japan's role in regional infrastructure to show how our understanding of international relations and international political economy in Asia can be better informed by economic history and area studies.     

‘Forewarned Is Forearmed’: Intelligence,Japan's Siberian Intervention,and the Washington Conference

This article details the intelligence-gathering role of US railroad experts stationed in Siberia and Manchuria from 1917 to 1922. Beginning in April 1920, US railway officials began receiving intercepted correspondence between Japanese officials, passed to them from Japan's military headquarters in Harbin via a former Czechoslovak soldier. The intelligence shows that US officials were aware of highly detailed planning by Japanese expansionists. Whether or not US officials were completely cognisant of the intelligence's significance, these sources provide insight into why US diplomacy helped provide leverage to the moderates within Japan's government. In particular, the intercepted correspondence allows for a reinterpretation of Japanese Foreign Minister Uchida Yasuya's role during the Siberian expedition. This paper provides evidence that Uchida was not a moderate ally as scholars have traditionally claimed, but a key facilitator of Japan's military expansionists. It argues that the success of the Washington Conference, combined with the military's repeated failures to produce a victory in the Russian Far East, pressured Uchida into withdrawing his support for the expansionist programme. In addition to demonstrating the impact of the Washington Conference and the Siberian intervention on US–Japanese relations, this article helps explain Uchida's later re-emergence in the 1930s as a militarist sympathiser.     

Japan's FTA politics and the problem of agricultural trade liberalisation

Japan's willingness to negotiate Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) is not matched by a readiness to liberalise agricultural trade. Japan has used a variety of mechanisms to limit the extent of agricultural concessions in FTAs. Public choice theory predicts that FTAs are a more effective instrument for opening Japan's agricultural market than the WTO because they reshape the domestic politics of Japanese trade in ways that are conducive to further market opening. FTAs do this by altering the domestic politics of trade policymaking on the demand side as well as some aspects of the supply side. On the demand side, business groups mobilise even more strongly to demand an end to agricultural protection, whilst on the supply side, the value of FTAs for broader state interests are recognised by politician-leaders. Various structural obstacles in the policymaking process, however, prevent the altered demand and supply-side dynamics from necessarily delivering free trade outcomes.     

Open Door or Sphere of Influence?: The Diplomacy of the Japanese–French Entente and Fukien Question, 1905–1907

Japanese–French negotiation for their 1907 entente revealed contrasting approaches to the application of the Open Door principle in China, particularly to the Fukien province after the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Having learned about France's wish to receive Japanese guarantee for the safety of its colony in Indo-China, Japan strove to define Fukien as its additional sphere of influence once it had secured much needed loans in the Paris financial market. France tried to resist Japan's request to define Fukien as its sphere by adopting a secret note, and attempted to restrain Japan's future expansion into China by enmeshing Japan in the web of political and financial ententes with itself and Britain supporting Open Door. This approach of France was a continuation of French policy toward East Asia since the Boxer Uprising, securing its economic interests by supporting Open Door rather than pursuing territorial competition with other great powers in China. In contrast, the Japanese government strenuously attempted to weaken the general application of Open Door doctrine in China, and could define Fukien as Japan's additional sphere by securing a secret explanatory note for such a purpose.     

Japan's Policies Towards the Ainu Language and Culture with Special Reference to North Fennoscandian Sami Policies

Under Japan's colonization of Ainu Lands (Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin), the Ainu were disconnected from their lands by relocations and deprived of their language and culture by regulations. In 1899, the Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act came into force to finalize the assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese society. In 1997, as a result of Ainu efforts to scrap the assimilation policies, the Ainu Culture Promotion Act (CPA) replaced the Act of 1899. The CPA was expected to emancipate the Ainu from the sufferings caused by the assimilation policies, and yet it stipulated neither Ainu indigeneity nor their linguistic and cultural rights. It is still in effect even after the 2008 official recognition of the Ainu as an indigenous people in the northern part of Japan by the Government of Japan. This article attempts to examine Japan's past and present policies towards the Ainu language and culture in the international context for the revitalization of the Ainu language and culture as the Ainu desire. In order to do this, it first outlines the assimilation policies, and then traces the Ainu struggle for survival as a people. It also discusses the CPA and the Final Report written by the Advisory Committee for Future Ainu Policy, which both form the basis of Japan's present Ainu policies. Finally, in order to explore the revitalization of the Ainu language and culture, how the North Fennoscandian Sami policies have advanced is surveyed.     

Informing Airmen? The US Army Air Forces’ Intelligence on Japanese Fighter Tactics in The Pacific Theatre, 1941–5

This article traces the development of US air intelligence on the tactics and weapons of Japan's fighter forces during the Pacific War. During the opening stages of the conflict, the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) struggled to set up an intelligence network in the Pacific theater because they were unprepared to wage a large scale conflict against the Japanese. Prior to December 1941, most American air commanders expected Japan to refrain from initiating hostilities with the western powers, and were thus caught unawares when faced with the onslaught of the Japanese air services. The setbacks which US forces suffered in the western Pacific regions during the opening stages of the conflict persuaded air commanders to create a more efficient apparatus that was designed to make good use of the information which aircrews gathered in their encounters with enemy forces. By the end of 1942, observations of the Japanese air forces' performance in combat enabled the Americans to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of the tactical procedures which pilots needed to follow in order to neutralize their opponent. After 1943, the tide of the air war turned decisively in favor of the Allies, owing to the fact that Japan's strengths were stretched to the limit, and its industries could not replace the planes and equipment which the armed forces had lost during the battle of Midway and the Solomons campaign. As the conflict progressed, US aviators noticed how the Japanese had suffered losses to the point where they could no longer defend the skies above their occupied territories, as evidenced by the fact that enemy interceptors were appearing in ever-decreasing numbers. The development motivated airmen to seek ways to destroy the remnants of Japan's air forces as quickly as possible and thereby hasten the tempo of the campaign in the Pacific theater. However, the USAAF remained mindful of the difficulties they faced in fighting the Japanese. This was mainly because the intelligence secured via encounters with enemy forces continued to suggest that they still possessed a good number of serviceable planes, along with trained pilots who were able to cause significant disruption for US air missions. The evidence was taken as a clear indication that the Americans needed to deploy sufficient aircraft strengths and simultaneously develop the tactical methods needed to protect friendly forces against unnecessary casualties.     

Reassessing Human Geography in the Wake of China's Rise

A prominent human geographer, introducing a series of papers in a Eurasian Geography and Economics mini-symposium devoted to China's emergence, surveys the myriad global impacts of that country's rapid recent rise. The topics covered include the economic (i.e., rapid growth in the size of China's economy, preeminence as an exporter of manufactured goods, and role as a major natural resource consumer, overseas investor, and purchaser of U.S. debt obligations), the geopolitical (increasing involvement in international organizations, rising assertiveness in defense of territorial claims), and the environmental (e.g., carbon footprint, accelerated urbanization, dam building), as well as the implications of China's rise for the study of geography and development. He argues that assessment of the consequences of the country's emergence should not be based on simple extrapolation of present trends, but must take into account a number of looming questions relating to the competitiveness of China's manufacturing labor force (vis-à-vis other developing countries), capacity to innovate (as well as imitate), and transformative societal impacts of modernization and development.     

The Clean Energy Dilemma in Asia: Is There a Way Out?

A prominent American geographer and specialist on energy and environmental policies in developing countries assesses the challenge to sustainable development posed by Asia's rapid economic growth and the concurrent need to reduce the environmental impacts of energy production and use. A particular focus is on China and India, as rapidly growing energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters, and on Russia as a potentially important supplier of natural gas and liquid alternatives to coal use. The author suggests some elements of a strategy to resolve the dilemma of reducing global environmental impacts without penalizing Asia's economic development, although a significant energy transition over the next several decades appears quite difficult.     

Japan post-9/11: security policy,executive power and political change in an ‘un-normal’ country

This article argues that in contrast to the USA, United Kingdom, and Australia, the impact of 9/11 on Japanese executive power largely has been restricted to the realm of Japan's foreign policy and relations, with comparatively little effect on domestic policy. Indeed, the 9/11 attacks and ensuing War on Terror served mostly to augment an already existing trend in Japan towards constitutional reform and away from the duopoly on political power and policy traditionally shared between the Japanese bureaucracy and the Liberal Democratic Party factions.     

Ten years on: Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice

Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long‐term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire‐tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.     

A Japanese “Girl's Reading” of Dostoevsky's Poor Folk: Senuma Kayô and the Origins of Japanese “Girls' Literature”

Senuma Kayô (1875–1915) was Japan's first woman translator from Russian. She is now remembered mainly for her translations from Chekhov. This paper examines one of Kayô's early works, Mazushiki shôjo (A Poor Girl, 1904), translated from Dostoevsky's Poor Folk, which was one of the first Japanese translations of a work by Dostoevsky to be made directly from the Russian original. Kayô chose to translate only a part of Dostoevsky's work, focusing on the memoir of the character Varvara, in which her first love and its tragic end are recounted. While the central theme of Dostoevsky's work is poverty and its impact on human relationships, in Kayô's translation the central theme is Varvara's misfortune in love. In this emphasis Kayô found a “girl's story” in Dostoevsky's novel, and Mazushiki shôjo foreshadowed a new wave of Japanese girls' literature, which attracted many new female readers. Kayô's translation style is examined to see how it contributed to the development of a style appropriate to girls' story writing.     

Cultural attraction, ‘soft power’ and proximity: the popularity of Japanese language in Hong Kong since the 1980s

This paper discusses the cultural attraction, ‘soft power’, and importance of cultural proximity to the popularity of the Japanese language in Hong Kong over the last three decades. Exploration of both primary and secondary sources constitutes the main research methodology employed. Email surveys and face-to-face interviews were undertaken to ascertain the nature and degree of the cultural attraction that stimulates local people's interest in learning Japanese language and culture. The paper concludes that Japan's ‘soft power’, i.e., popular culture and cultural products, are the most influential driving forces behind the popularity of Japanese language in Hong Kong. Also, the Japanese cultural proximity to the Chinese is another factor that excites local people's interest in learning Japanese as a foreign language. In the Hong Kong context, geopolitical and national identity factors do not seem to detract from the popularity of the Japanese language.     

Perceptions of trekking tourism and social and environmental change in Nepal's Himalayas

The Himalayas are among the world's youngest mountain ranges. In addition to the geologic processes of mountain building and erosion, they are also highly vulnerable to human influenced change, occurring at local, national, regional, and international scales. A photo-elicitation methodology is employed to show how residents perceive those changes from historical perspectives, as well as their current conditions and impacts on their daily lives. Nepal's Khumbu region has undergone major social and environmental transformations since the 1960s when international trekking first began to influence the area's economy. The current perceptions of Khumbu residents of these changes are assessed through photo-elicitation interviews. Their responses are placed in the historical context of: (1) institutional and political changes, most of which have been driven by national government policies; (2) social and economic changes, for which the tourism economy has been central; and (3) environmental changes, reflecting the impacts of resource management and climate change. The mostly positive perceptions of Khumbu residents toward how their region has changed reflects general improvements in the physical and cultural landscapes of the Khumbu over time, as well as its continuing geographic isolation, which has helped to slow the rate of globalization, while also keeping the region a dynamic and popular tourist destination.     

International Marriage in Japan: 'Race' and 'Gender' perspectives

Despite an image of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, Japan in fact is host to significant minority populations. A considerable part of these minorities derive from flows of labour migrants from the Asian periphery to Japan-a process dominated by female labour migrants who work mainly in the entertainment and sex-related industries. One social phenomenon resulting from the presence of female labour migrants is the rise in cases of international marriages. With regard to Asian women, in Japan mainly negative images prevail in their representation as entertainers and sex workers. Public discourse has almost exclusively dealt with problems they experience as hostesses and/or prostitutes, and they are hardly ever portrayed as the ordinary wives of Japanese citizens-a role in which they have much in common with Japanese wives. Previous research on the problems occurring in international marriages has mainly concentrated on the 'racial' or 'ethno-cultural' differences between the spouses and has neglected the broader issue of gender inequalities. The latter is, however, of crucial importance, and it is argued by feminists that 'marriage' is often only a disguise for men's acquisition of cheap domestic and sexual services. In this article, I provide a preliminary analysis of international marriage as the result of labour migration by exploring the interconnectedness of patriarchal relations 'at home' and abroad. The situation of Asian women, primarily Filipinas, married to Japanese men, is explored through interview data. The issue of gender is, however, not sufficient when discussing Filipino wives of Japanese men. 'Racial' stereotypes also have to be taken into account as factors which circumscribe the social reality of Asian women in Japan.     

The re-examination of Chiang Kai-shek's returning virtue for malice policy towards Japan after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War

After victory in the Anti-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek issued the famous radio speech “Letter to Soldiers and Civilians of the Whole Nation as well as the Peoples of the World after the Victory of the Anti-Japanese War.” The main idea of this speech was long interpreted as “returning virtue for malice” (or “good for evil”), a basic principle of the Kuomintang's policy towards Japan. Many scholars who have considered the returning virtue for malice policy in the postwar period include the following major issues: first, China repatriated Japanese prisoners of war and the Japanese diaspora with mercy; second, China allowed the Tenno, or imperial, system to be preserved in Japan; third, China did not participate in the occupation of Japan; and fourth, China gave up the right to ask for war reparations from Japan. This article examines the above four issues to reevaluate the returning virtue for malice policy. The first issue seems to reflect the Chinese national character of being lenient with others. However, it was in fact due to Chiang's anti-Communist strategy and the declared policy of the United States of eradicating Japan's influence in China. With regard to the second issue, Chiang's attitude was merely to let the Japanese people make their own choice, while the fate of the Japanese Tenno system was entirely determined by the US occupation authority, on which Chiang had little influence. The third issue was mainly the outcome of Chiang's focus on domestic political struggle in the postwar era in China. As for war reparations, China actually made efforts to obtain them in the beginning, but had to give up its right eventually. The decision-making process in the Kuomintang government was restrained by American policy and subordinated to Japanese pressure. Thus, it is not persuasive to summarize the basic principle of Kuomintang postwar policy towards Japan as returning virtue for malice.     

The 'greening' of global project financing: the case of the Sakhalin-II offshore oil and gas project

This article responds to a plea for economic geographers to play greater attention to the world's resource peripheries. The article presents a detailed case study of oil and gas development offshore of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East. The study serves to illustrate the complexity of resource peripheries and to demonstrate how a critical approach to resource geographies aids economic geographic theorization of globalization. The case study focuses on how the 'greening' of global project financing has created a means by which environmental non-governmental organizations hold the international oil companies to account. The article describes the transnational advocacy network that has developed to protest against the Sakhalin-II project. The key issues are identified and the response of the operator, Sakhalin Energy, is considered. Finally, the recent actions of the Russian Government in relation to the environmental impacts of the Sakhalin-II project are examined. The article concludes by assessing the ways in which the Sakhalin case demonstrates the complex processes that construct resource peripheries and how such analyses contribute to the development of a truly global economic geography. Le 'verdissement' du financement de projets à