The academy on Japanese foreign policy

Abstract

Japan's foreign policy was all but totally ignored by American scholars and politicians alike through the late 1960s. The recent rash of English-language publishing on the subject, therefore, amounting to at least thirteen major monographs since 1970, is itself an occurrence worthy of note. Well-known works on U.S. foreign policy of the Kennedy and Johnson years (Schlesinger's Thousand Days, Hilsman's To Move a Nation, Walton's Cold War and Counterrevolution, LBJ's Vantage Point, and others) fail to devote even one single paragraph to the role expected of Japan under America's order in the Pacific. And the first five volumes of this Bulletin (1969-73) contain only four articles about current Japanese foreign affairs, three of them by the same author, Herb Bix. Were it not for Bix, John Dower, Pacific Imperialism Notebook, and the AMPO Collective in Tokyo, the anti-imperialist wing of American Asian Studies as well would be guilty of a most serious oversight. Now, however, it appears the halycon era of Tokyo's passive free-riding “low posture” is coming to a close. Foreign sectors of both the American and Japanese economies are growing. Competition between the two economies is increasing, especially for limited fuel and raw material resources around the world. The Nixon Doctrine is selectively curtailing the U.S. military presence in Asia. China is expanding its diplomatic capacity in the region, even to the extent of pursuing detente with America. And Tokyo is finally being presented with some real foreign policy choices. The Pacific “Anglo-Saxon lake” may not yet have changed into a multipolar ocean, since the U.S.-Japan alliance remains the defining diplomatic relationship in East Asian international relations. But the whole scene is less predictable now than at any previous time during the postwar Cold War decades. And once again the academic world has responded to emergent international conflict by producing an imposing quantity of policy-oriented writing.