Setting Japanese Security in Context
Debates over Japanese security policy under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are often led by the question of whether Abe should be seen as a pragmatist or as a revisionist nationalist. Andrew Oros’s timely new work steps back to argue that the changes in security policy reflect long-term, evolutionary changes, accepted across the Japanese political spectrum, in response to a more threatening post-cold War security environment in Northeast Asia and beyond.
Japan’s security “renaissance” has been reinforced by a weakening of some taboos that once dominated security debates in Cold War Japan. At the same time, the country’s identity politics remains split between contested narratives about the wartime era, the country’s anti-militarist and pacifist beliefs, and ambiguities around the long-term US alliance. Oros skillfully blends English and Japanese-language scholarship to give us a comprehensive picture of the intersection between domestic politics, security policy and debates about the past. He offers an optimistic view of the future in which Japan continues its gradual, evolutionary trajectory towards greater security activism, without compromising its measured approach towards foreign policy. He persuasively depicts Abe as advancing a gradualist process of security policy reform, not forcing an abrupt and radical departure from post-war norms and values.