Re-reading The Indo-Pacific as Aidagara: Watsuji Tetsurō’s Relevance to Japan’s Foreign Relations

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on how space and relationships co-produce one another within the Japanese foreign policy language of the Indo-Pacific. By reframing Agent-Structure dynamics, by which actors and social structures reproduce one another, into Watsuji Tetsurō’s idea of aidagara (“inter-relationships”) consisting of the Agent-Structure relationship being mutually constitutive with space within which the relationship is situated, this article fills a gap in the literature by bringing space back into discussions on international political dynamics. The article analyses Japanese government narratives appearing in official pronouncements and media reports to show that Japan’s foreign relations are apprehended as a function of space, and vice versa. These narratives show that the Indo-Pacific takes on a double-meaning: as a geographical space within which Agent-Structure dynamics play out, and as a concept that denotes what this space means for Japanese diplomacy. By reframing the Agent-Structure relationships into aidagara, scholars can rethink an interpenetrating dynamic involving the Indo-Pacific as a space that reproduces Japan’s evolving political relationships, and as relationships reproducing space.