Japan at the Crossroads: Conflict and Compromise after Anpo

Abstract

In Japan at the Crossroads, Nick Kapur brilliantly succeeds in the ambitious goal of providing a sweeping overview of the politics, foreign policy, intellectual life, civil society, media and culture of postAnpo Japan, painting a picture of the country in the early 1960s that is at the same time rich in detail and broad in scope. Kapur’s choice of pairing a diplomatic/political history approach in the first part of the book with an intellectual/ cultural history one in the latter half is all the more refreshing as it is unusual in standard histories of postwar Japan. The book is also a work of remarkable (if unintentional) contemporary relevance, tackling a central question that echoes a present-day conundrum in Western democracies (notwithstanding evident differences with the context of 1960 Japan): how can a newly elected leader steer their country in a moment of national crisis, reconciling deep ideological divisions across society in the aftermath of shocking episodes of unrest, and replace an administration with little to no regard for democratic principles and processes? The protagonist of Kapur’s book is not Joe Biden in postTrump America, but Ikeda Hayato, the unassuming bureaucrat who against all odds became the tenth Prime Minister of postwar Japan in July 1960 and who oversaw its economic boom. As Kapur masterfully summarizes in the introduction, Ikeda proved himself to be up to the difficult task of pacifying a country fractured by the nation-wide opposition to the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty (Anpo), which had been rammed through the Diet by his heavy-handed predecessor, Kishi Nobusuke. Ikeda’s solution was – much like Biden’s ‘foreign policy for the middle class’ – that of strengthening Japan’s international alliances while pursuing a ‘low profile’, domestic-focused economic agenda. While some Ikeda biographers in Japan have cynically pointed to his unfamiliarity with foreign policy matters and his fortune of being the right man in the right place at the right time as the reasons behind the choice and success of this strategy (Nakamura 1995), Kapur presents Ikeda’s key achievements in domestic and foreign policy – his famous ‘income-doubling plan’ and the establishment of a more equal ‘consultative relationship’ with the US respectively – as the legacies of a statesman with competence and vision, not just luck and good timing. In doing so, he contributes to an emerging drive in Anglophone scholarship on Japanese diplomatic and political history that re-evaluates the leadership skills and individual initiative of Japanese premiers usually perceived as technocratic