Understanding Japanese Foreign Policy

Review: Understanding Japanese Foreign Policy Author(s): J. A. A. Stockwin Reviewed work(s): Anglo-Japanese Alienation 1919-1952 by Ian Nish Occupation Diplomacy: Britain, the United States and Japan, 1945-1952 by Roger Buckley Japan's Quest for Comprehensive Security: Defence, Diplomacy and Dependence by J. W. M. Chapman ; R. Drifte ; I. T. M. Gow ... Source: Review of International Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 157-168 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20097042 Accessed: 11/05/2010 04:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. 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Anglo- Japanese Alienation 1919-1952, Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1982, x + 305 pp., ?20.00. Roger Buckley, Occupation Diplomacy: Britain, the United States and Japan, 1945-1952, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, xi + 294 pp. ?22.50. J. W. M. Chapman, R. Drifte and I. T. M. Gow, Japan's Quest for Comprehensive Security: Defence, Diplomacy and Dependence, London: Frances Pinter, 1982, xviii + 259 pp. ?15.95. Nobutoshi Akao (ed.), Japan's Economic Security, Aldershot: Gower, 1983, xii + 279 pp. ?16.50. Frank Langdon, Canadian-Japanese Economic Relations, 1952-1983, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983, xiii + 180 pp. Shibusawa Masahide, Japan and the Asian Pacific Region, London: Croom Helm, 1984, 196 pp. ?17.95. Somebody reading these books in rough chronological order of subject matter without previous knowledge of Japan might well end up bemused and sceptical. In the early part of the story we have a militarized and expansionist power, colonizer of Korea and Taiwan, creator of the puppet state of Manchukuo, extending its control over large tracts of China, competing in military might and especially naval tonnage with the great powers of Europe and North America, then destroying the American fleet at Pearl Harbor and carving out a huge empire stretching from the Gilbert and Ellice islands to the borders of the Soviet Union, from Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians to Java and Sumatra in the far south. In the middle part of the story Japan is defeated, shattered, occupied and narrowly avoids being carved up between the Western powers and the Soviet Union, as happened to Germany. Then for a long time despite recovery of national independence, there appears to be hardly any Japanese foreign policy to speak of, as the state is placed firmly under the security protection of the United States. This protection, though highly restrictive of foreign policy choice, is also substantially benign and conducive to national economic recovery. Finally, in the last part of the story we have Japan again making a spectacular impact on world affairs, but in the field of economics rather than politics. Her economic competitiveness is a source of anxiety for manufac turing industry in Europe and North America, while the Japanese economy is the dominant force in most of East and South-East Asia, as well as being crucial to Australasia. Strange as it may seem, however, given Japan's recent military past, defence spending and still more surprisingly strategic planning have been given low priority, so that Japan stands out among the most 0260-2105/85/02/0157-12/S03.00 ? 1985 Review of International Studies 158 Understanding Japanese foreign policy powerful of the world's nation states as the one where there is least consensus about the necessity for a massive defence effort. Only in the most recent period under intense American pressure, has a more 'realistic' attitude to national defence been emerging. An overwhelmingly strong impression then, from reading these books, is one of historical discontinuity. The grimly authoritarian Japan that set out to establish by force of arms, and thus control, a 'Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere' from 1941, and in the process to eliminate British and American influence from Asia, is now entwined in a close security alliance with the United States, and has to co-exist with a number of self-consciously nationalistic neighbours whose governments are in firm control of their territories and destinies. The nation itself is the most open and unrepressive society in Asia, in which the general level of prosperity and personal satisfaction is high?certainly beyond all comparison with what it was before the war. Significant continuities Emerging through the predominant picture of discontinuity, on the other hand, are important elements of continuity between Japanese foreign relations before and since the Pacific war. This is not exactly the continuity posited by some popular commentators, who incline to the view that the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower in recent years constitutes 'the pursuit of war by other means'. Such a view is seductively attractive to some in Western countries, South-East Asia and elsewhere, adversely affected by competition from Japanese manufacturing industry. The really significant continuities are more subtle than this, and fall under the following headings. First, there is the abiding Japanese concern for resource and food security. The refrain that Japan is a 'have not' country, perilously dependent on external (and therefore difficult to control) sources of fuel, industrial raw materials, and food, was sounded by Japanese leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, quoted m Anglo-Japanese Alienation 1919-1952, just as it is in the later chapters of Japan's Quest for Comprehensive Security and the Akao volume, Japan's Economic Security. The problem is similar, but the method of solving it has changed. In the period leading up to the Pacific War, Western attempts to deprive Japan of raw materials (as well as freezing her out of markets) were met ultimately by the desperate response of territorial conquest. In the 1970s and 1980s it is met by the more sophisticated response of diversifying sources of supply, maximizing bargaining power, avoiding excessive dependence on any particular source (oil, however, being the great problem in this respect) and developing optimum levels of intelligence and flexibility in response to changing circumstances of price, reliability of supply and so on. A second area of continuity lies in the search for a reliable ally or protector among the Western powers. The Anglo-Japanese alliance represented the end product of such a search in the first two decades of the present century. Arguably?though this would be hotly contested by Koreans, for instance? the dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in the early 1920s facilitated the more paranoid attitudes to the outside world that made their appearance in the 1930s, since Japan was friendless and unprotected and therefore more vulnerable to the domestic forces of blind chauvinism, than might otherwise J. A. A. Stock win 159 have been the case. The Japan-United States alliance system which emerged out of the (largely American) occupation of Japan of 1945-52 was born in startlingly different circumstances from the Anglo-Japanese alliance. It has also greatly changed in nature as Japan has become once more a power to be reckoned with. Though some Japanese leaders have been tempted to adopt a more independent foreign policy, and though severe economic problems have at times strained the alliance, it remains the case that Japan's foreign policy is worked out in a context which is governed by a stable and far-reaching set of arrangements with the United States. That these arrangements have been flexible enough to survive despite the emergence of Japan as an economic superpower, is a tribute to good sense on both sides. It is also, however, a result of the fact that none of the possible alternatives to alliance with the United States would appear attractive or practicable in present international circumstances. Multi-faceted foreign policy Japan has interacted so closely with the United States since 1945 that, as a side-effect, Americans have constituted the large majority of commentators on Japanese affairs. The six books under review have in common (with one exception) the fact that they are not written by Americans. The exception is Langdon, but he writes from a Canadian base about Canadian-Japanese relations. Although it is scarcely the case that the six books together constitute a coherent alternative to a predominant 'American' perspective on Japanese foreign relations, at least it is true that most of the authors are conscious of the multi-faceted nature of Japanese foreign policy, even within the framework of the American alliance which has dominated the recent period. The first two books are essentially about Japan's relations with Britain, at a time when Britain's world role in general, and the East Asian role in particular, were in decline. The book edited by Nish?product of an Anglo Japanese conference on the history of the Second World War held in 1979?in fact covers the relatively long period from the end of the First World War to the final year of the Allied Occupation. Buckley's book deals more narrowly with the Occupation period itself. An impression that emerges from both books is that the British were?with varying degrees of commitment and intensity depending on the periods and individuals involved?fighting a rearguard action against accelerating loss of influence. Although by the time of the San Francisco Peace Conference in 1952, American domination of Japan's destinies had been firmly established, at the expense of a significant British role, British-Japanese relations have been unduly neglected. Anglo-Japanese Alienation 1919-1952 contains 14 chapters, three of which are by the leading Japanese historian of Japanese international relations, Hosoya Chihiro. The book is divided into three parts, 1919-41 (The Process of Alienation'), 1941-5, and 1945-52. Professor Hosoya contributes two chapters on how Britain and the United States were viewed by Japan in the pre-war international system. He underlines the long-term adverse effect on opinion in Japan of the termination of the Anglo-Japanese alliance, and the sense of Japanese 'loneliness' that this engendered. Nevertheless, as late as 1934, proposals for a renewal of the alliance (or something like it) seem to have been seriously contemplated by both sides, while co-operation in defence of common interests in China seems to have been a continuing motivation. As 160 Understanding Japanese foreign policy late as May 1938 Prime Minister Konoe was reshuffling his cabinet in such a way as to facilitate negotiations with Britain, and the new Foreign Minister Ugaki Kazushige confided in his diary that Japan could not lose in free economic competition in East Asia with the other powers, whose vested interests should be respected and with which co-operation in resource development should be sought. Although this approach was to be over whelmed by those agitating for a new East Asian order, it is prescient of the 'business first' attitudes that were to prevail in the recent decades. Nish, in his chapter, shows that a variety of factors influenced British top-level attitudes towards Japan, from the fact that greater importance was attached to Europe to the Australian concern for British naval protection. For Britain, as for the United States, the biggest issue of contention with Japan was China, and Nish interestingly argues that the British experience of having to deal with Indian nationalism made them more sensitive to Chinese nationalism than the Japanese were. In the multi-faceted picture of British Japanese relations in the 1930s, commercial factors such as the Japanese impact on the Lancashire cotton industry played, in Nish's estimation, a minor role when compared with matters of grand strategy. In Britain, as in Japan, the primacy of economics over strategy was a thing of the future. Usui Katsumi, in an examination of Japanese attitudes to Britain in 1937-41, illuminates a dominant facet of thinking shared by the relatively liberal and the ultra-chauvinistic alike, namely that the existing Western 'liberal' political and economic order in East Asia was profoundly unjust, and that Japan, as a 'have not' power, must work for a radically new regional order. Though, again, there was an articulate minority (such as Prime Minister Yonai, and probably the Emperor himself) which believed that Japan's practical interests lay in continued friendship with Britain, it could not be sustained in face of an avalanche of radical passion. As Hagiwara Nobutoshi argues in his comment on Usui's chapter, Japan had missed out on the European ordeal of the First World War, and was still in her East Asian isolation enthralled by romantic notions of war. But the key point is that Japan had a deeply felt interest in systemic change. Miscalculations The most striking finding of Peter Lowe's chapter on the 1937-41 period is the astonishing underestimation by British leaders (including Churchill) of Japan's military capacity. Thus Ambassador Craigie's view that war might have been avoided by a more flexible attitude towards Japan in the period up to December 1941 (a view anathema to Churchill and Eden) needs to be seen in the context of a failure to understand what for the Western allies war in East Asia was going to mean. The Roosevelt-Churchill decision to repudiate appeasement in reaction against Munich was to prove costlier than they had contemplated in relation to Japan. Miscalculation, however, was not confined to the Allied side. As Ikeda Kiyoshi demonstrates in his chapter on Japanese strategy during the war, determined as Japan's naval and military leaders were, they did not fully understand the implications of total war. Unlike the Russo-Japanese war, the conflict in the Pacific did not turn out to have limits, nor was peace negotiable once the Allies had been given a good hiding. Japan in her turn grievously underestimated the strength and determination of the Allies. J. A. A. Stockwin 161 Nomura Mimoru emphasizes a further Japanese miscalculation, the overestimation of German military capacity (hardly surprising in the early stages of the war), which was compounded by well-documented lack of co-ordination inside the Japanese military machine, all leading to over extension of battle lines and to ultimate disaster. Henry Probert, in his analysis of British strategy towards Japan during the war, shows how Britain, fighting for survival in Europe, was too weak to do more than cede second place to the Americans in the war against Japan. Even so, he argues, the British achieve ments of 1944-5 in India and Burma were impressive. Wartime planning for post-war Asia is covered by Iriye Akira for Japan and Christopher Thorne for Britain. In the Japanese case there was a gap between leaders of the armed forces, concerned largely or exclusively with strategic aims, and civilian leaders who were also exercised about the kind of world a Japanese victory (or later, defeat) would and should produce. Some of these notions bore a remarkable similarity to Western internationalist statements such as the Atlantic Charter. British planning for the post-war future of Asia was almost as confused (and much of it as inapposite) as that of Japan, which is hardly surprising given the massive blows dealt by the war to Britain's position in East Asia. A striking emphasis of Thome's chapter is on the extent to which Churchill was an unreconstructed reactionary in his views on colonial policy. The Occupation period is dealt with for Japan by Watanabe Akio while Gordon Daniels treats British attitudes to Japan during the same period. Watanabe presents a fascinating array of opinions by Japanese political and intellectual leaders seeking to come to terms with the nation's reduced circumstances and the rapidly changing world environment. What is most striking is the speed and accuracy with which perceptive individuals such as Dr Okita Saburo (noted economist and a recent Foreign Minister), the post-war Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, and the veteran statesman Ugaki Kazushige, understood how much a regime of global (as well as regional) free trade was in Japan's interests. They were wrong in assuming that China would be part of such a scheme, but there was little doubt that Yosnida held views similar to those of the British government that the American attitude of treating People's China as a communist pariah was counterproductive. Had the Americans not forced Japan in the early fifties to conform to rigid anti-China policies, one wonders whether the Sino-Soviet split?and indeed the current reintroduc tion of 'capitalist' elements into the Chinese economy with Japanese help?would have been postponed as long as they have. Daniels' picture of British opinion about Japan during the Occupation shows that Japan impinged relatively little on the British consciousness, which was preoccupied elsewhere. Northern textile interests were vocal against competition from Japan rather than devising strategies to meet such competition with greater efficiency. Generally, however, non-punitive attitudes came to prevail, as Britain, both from conviction and a sense of her reduced role, came to align herself with the broad lines of American Japan policies. Perhaps the three most significant points in Donald Watt's complex concluding chapter are: first that misunderstandings over China were the long-term cause of the Pacific war; second, that Anglo-Japanese alienation before the Pacific war was compounded by the erroneous British assumption that the Japanese motivations for joining the Axis pact were ideological rather 162 Understanding Japanese foreign policy than power-political, while the Japanese similarly misunderstood Britain'; relationship with the United States as primary rather than an aspect of British relations with Japan and Germany; third, that Pearl Harbor changed everything. Certainly we may concur with the last point. The world that has emerged ultimately and painfully from that tragic event is crucially different and also perhaps saner than that which preceded it. Cautious attitudes Roger Buckley's Occupation Diplomacy is a historian's attempt to use newly opened archives to reassess the British role in the Allied Occupation of Japan and push back the prevailing wisdom that it was an all-American