Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia

Abstract

Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia. By Richard J. Samuels. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007. 277 pages. $49.95 ($19.95 paper). The author, a scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has specialized in Japanese affairs for many years, identifies his thesis in the opening line: "Many Japanese analysts do not believe Japan now has a coherent grand strategy, and more than a few insist that it has never had one." This reviewer agrees with that judgment. Professor Samuels, however, strives mightily over the next 210 pages to show that Japan, indeed, has had a grand strategy since the Meiji Restoration of 1868 when it left its feudal age and leapt into the modern era. "Japanese security policy," Samuels asserts, "has traveled a consistent path since the nineteenth century." In that time, Japan entered the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 to ally itself with Britain, then a powerful empire whose navy ruled the waves. In 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact to join the Axis of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, which Samuels fails to mention. After that pact ended in utter defeat, Japan signed a mutual security treaty with the United States. Samuels sees all those alliances and relationships as crafting a grand strategy. They might be better labeled, in the kindest interpretation, as a series of pragmatic and expedient maneuvers to align Japan with the prevailing power of the time. Japan, a middle-sized, resource-poor island nation, is stuck in a rough neighborhood and needs outside friends to survive, not to mention prosper. The author makes much of the "Yoshida Doctrine," named for the late Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, the towering figure who led Japan out of the valley of death following World War II. The Japanese, however, do not favor doctrines, preferring instead vague guidelines that permit freedom of action when circumstances change. Yoshida, ever the practical politician, is not known to have ever used the term. Nor did his "deshi" or followers such as Prime Ministers Hayato Ikeda, Eisaku Sato, Kakuei Tanaka, and on through Kiichi Miyazawa, a lineage lasting until 1993. Samuels says the first Japanese to cite the Yoshida Doctrine was Masataka Kosaka, who in 1963 was credited with first use of the term. It is interesting that the author only identifies him as an adviser of Yoshida's. In any event, most scholars agree that the concept of the Yoshida Doctrine rests on two principles: (1) Rely on America to ensure Japan's security while Japan does the minimum necessary to defend itself, and (2) Place maximum effort on economic development, largely through export of goods to pay for much-needed imports. Japan has put those two principles of security policy into practice for the last half century. The nation spends only one percent of its gross national product on defense, a limit endorsed by Japanese taxpayers. Its armed forces are about the 25th largest in the world and are circumscribed with constitutional, legal, and political restraints. …