Japan’s Slow Road To a New Identity
Japan has pursued liberal value-based foreign policy under Shinzo Abe, mostly targeted at balancing an increasingly assertive China together with the US. Abe’s foreign policy has been shaped and propelled by a new Japanese identity rebuilt from a postwar “abnormal” to a “normal” country that can wage wars to protect its sovereignty, no longer relying on a US security umbrella. The rebuilding has evolved since the 1990s but driven by Abe’s political conviction to build a “new” Japan that he calls a “beautiful country.”
This is an outsider’s view of Japanese identity reconstruction and its effects on Japan’s domestic, foreign and security policies, which Michael Kolmas, professor at Metropolitan University Prague, labels as “revisionism” of the Yoshida doctrine. Japanese revisionism built up from within society, not simply as a response to the changing international system; the author sees in Abe not a pragmatist, but an “identity entrepreneur” with a clear vision for Japan and a strong will to achieve it. Analyzing four sets of Abe’s revisionist narratives — constitutional change, school education (history, in particular), proactive security policy, and regional leadership in East Asia — Kolmas contends that the change is much slower, more complicated and nuanced than generally anticipated, because the revisionist projects are constrained by the pacifist identity long embedded in Japanese post-war political and social institutions. Japan’s march towards a “normal” country, Kolmas thus concludes, will only continue in steps, not leaps.