Is Japan's Aging Peace Aging Gracefully?

Abstract

Is Japan's Aging Peace Aging Gracefully? Paul Midford (bio) With Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century, Tom Phuong Le has written what is arguably the most comprehensive and compelling scholarly book-length study to address the question "can Japan become a major military power?" Moreover, the book answers with a resounding "no." Le devotes two chapters to explaining the demographic and technical-infrastructural constraints on Japan's industry and economy that he identifies as major barriers to Japan's reemergence as a major military power. Nonetheless, at the heart of Le's argument are claims that antimilitarism, peace culture, and normative restraints prevent Japan from reemerging as a major military power, which is what one would expect from an unabashedly constructivist work. Two years after its publication, the material constraints identified in Le's book, especially demographic, but also technological and economic, have changed little or become even more binding. But what about the ideational constraints on the country's reemergence as a military power, specifically antimilitarism, peace culture, and political and normative restraints? While they still exist, it is easy to argue that since 2021, and especially 2022, these ideational constraints have become far less limiting. Many observers argue that Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and China's large-scale military exercises around Taiwan following the visit of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to that island in August 2022, have redrawn the baseline for how the Japanese public views issues of war and peace, creating a far more permissive environment for Japan to "finally cast off pacifism" (something that pundits have been telling us at regular intervals over the past thirty years has just been achieved) and reemerge as a great military power. Certainly, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, opinion polls in Japan showed a jump in support for increasing military spending. A plurality or small majority of those polled also supported Japan's acquisition of counterstrike capabilities, which would allow the country to attack military bases in foreign countries. Following this shift, the Kishida administration announced a dramatic increase in Japan's defense spending (although less than the doubling that had originally been discussed) as well as plans to [End Page 179] acquire offensive counterstrike capabilities.1 Based on these developments, many are ready to write an obituary for Japan's pacifism, antimilitarism, and normative constraints. This would imply that, apart from the material constraints he identifies, the ideational side of Le's book has not aged well. Although I do not emphasize the role of norms and pacifism as security policy constraints in my own work, and although I think the influence of antimilitarism in Japan has faded over time as trust in both the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) and civilian control has risen, I do not agree with those who argue that all constraints on postwar Japanese security policy have been thrown off. These constraints remain far more limiting than is commonly recognized. Nonetheless, I argue here that these are not the constraints of antimilitarism, pacifism, or norms, but rather the long-standing attitudes of the Japanese public toward remilitarization, which I first identified as attitudinal defensive realism in my book, Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism?2 In 2022, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and China's large-scale military exercises around Taiwan both had a significant impact on Japanese public opinion and defense policy, but these events did not motivate Japan to throw off the postwar constraints it has been operating under and reemerge as a great military power. Rather, the result has been to cause Japanese public opinion and government policy to double down on territorial defense. What is clearly absent from the mainstream of the new security debate, and even from Japan's new basic security documents that the Kishida administration issued in December 2022 (most notably, the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the Defense Buildup Program),3 are any signs that Japan is moving in the direction of reemerging as a military power prepared to project military force overseas, even in the case of its neighbor Taiwan. Moreover, it is important to...