Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China by Sheila A. Smith (review)

Relations between China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-largest economies, have attracted global attention in recent years, not least due to the rising tensions between the two countries over issues such as Japan’s historical revisionism and the unresolved territorial dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Academically, the field has benefited over the last decade or so from a wealth of studies of various aspects of the relationship, from economics, through politics, to security (see, for example, Ming Wan, Richard C. Bush, James Reilly, Yinan He, Yew Meng Lai, Linus Hagström, and Jing Sun to name but a few authors of English-language sources).

Sheila Smith’s contribution to this burgeoning field focuses on the Japanese perspective, and her aim is to offer an insight into the way in which “Chinese influences on Japanese society are perceived and into the relations among the various domestic actors and agents shaping Japan’s domestic policymaking on China” (p. 16). The author argues that there is “a more complex array of interests” contributing to the formation of Japan’s China policies in the 2000s than had hitherto been the case. In particular, the role of the private sector and popular opinion are considered important elements influencing decision makers, and the book guides us through case studies of the dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, food safety issues, the Yasukuni Shrine problem, and resource rivalry in the East China Sea as means of demonstrating how and why Japan’s policymakers dealt with the issues at hand. This is an ambitious task, given that most of the chosen case studies merit, and have indeed been the subject of, lengthy in-depth studies in their own right.¹ Nonetheless, Smith does demonstrate the need to open up the black box of decision making in order to appreciate the complexity of Japan’s China policy over the last 10 to 15 years.

The first chapter sets the scene by introducing the main structure and themes of the book, before moving on to chapter 2, which explores the evolution of Japan-China relations since the end of World War II. The key message in this chapter is the changing influences on Japan’s China policymaking over time from politicians and the business elite to a broader, and varied, set of domestic interests, including political parties, advocacy groups, and public opinion. With this proliferation of often contending interests in mind, the remainder of the book is devoted to exploring the case studies and teasing out the key factors affecting policy outputs.

The first study, of the Yasukuni Shrine problem, provides useful historical background and an analysis of Koizumi’s visits to the shrine between 2001 and 2006, which led to a deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations overall. The dominant domestic groups affecting Koizumi’s decisions in this case were the Liberal Democratic Party and the Izokukai (War-Bereaved Families Association), but Smith also outlines Koizumi’s own personal calculus and demonstrates the evolution of his thinking on the visits during his time in office. The brief section on China’s feelings about the Yasukuni Shrine would have benefited from a lengthier exposition given that, as Smith rightly claims, they “have been an important part of the domestic politics of memorializing Japan’s war dead since the 1980s” (p. 94).

Chapter 4 deals with the problem of rivalry for potential gas and oil deposits in the East China Sea, an issue that has been on and off the diplomatic agenda since the late 1970s. As Smith shows, the agreement to shelve the issue of maritime boundaries (in this case in relation to the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands) in 1978 began to be seriously tested in the 1990s with changes to the international maritime regime in the form of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Smith outlines the challenges facing successive Japanese...