Japan's Security Agenda: Military, Economic, and Environmental Dimensions (review)

This ambitious book looks at Japan's security policy during the cold war and post-cold-war period in a comprehensive and holistic way. Christopher Hughes uses an extended concept of security that "incorporates and captures the complexity of security paradigms across different definitions, actors, issues, and approaches" (p. 8). He refers duly to the concept of comprehensive security which sanctioned such an approach to security policy. The book argues that Japan kept quite well and very successfully (for Japan as well as the region) to this holistic approach during the cold war and particularly during the first decade of the post-cold-war era, but that it now looks likely that a shrinking overseas development assistance (ODA) budget and American demands for a greater military role will lead Japan from using its economic power for security needs to greater use of its military power. The author clearly considers this switch of approach as inappropriate because he gives more weight to the rise of nonmilitary security challenges in East Asia than to that of traditional military security problems.

The first chapter outlines the military, economic, and environmental aspects of security, painting a picture of mutually interlinked security actors, dimensions of security, and approaches to these. The second chapter is a first application of this extended security concept to East Asia's cold war security along the themes of decolonization, bipolarization, and nascent globalization. The next chapter deals with the current security agenda of the region in the same way, although the author now speaks of the continued influence of decolonization, bipolarization, and the forces of full-scale globalization. The author concludes from these two multilevel overview chapters that an effective way of dealing with these interrelated military, economic, and environmental security problems is to have a comprehensive approach that integrates military and economic means.

In the next three chapters, the second half of the book, the author deals directly with Japan's security policy. The chapter on Japan's security policy during the cold war is very positive despite mentioning Tokyo's support for authoritarian regimes on the grounds of its alliance with the United States and its developmentalist approach. The alliance with the United States is evaluated as having contributed to stability in the international system. Judgment of Japan's military policy is probably so positive because of the various self-imposed restraints that make it look rather moderate compared with the author's later evaluation of Japan's postwar security policy. In the chapter on current defense policy, Hughes comes to the overall conclusion that although Japan's policymakers provided latent options for alternatives to the Japan-U.S. alliance, in the end Japan strengthened bilateral security cooperation, thus making it "harder to develop its own individual and multilateral frameworks as true alternatives" (p. 165). While he believes Japan still maintains a certain degree of strategic independence under the new Defense Guidelines of 1997 vis-à-vis the United States due to their geographical ambiguity on China and Taiwan, he sees the possibility of an irreversible tightening of the alliance bonds as a result of the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) projects.

Since the book was written, Japan has moved from joint research with the United States to a decision to deploy its part of the Japan-U.S. BMD systems. The main reasons given for this tightening are Japan's dependence on the United States for technology, intelligence, and real-time command-control exigencies as related to BMD. As a result, Hughes thinks Japan will have to reconsider its current limits on collective self-defense, a prediction borne out by the current Japanese security debate. He believes the adoption of an untrammeled collective defense posture is liable to lead to a "radical transformation in Japan's military security policy" (p. 206).

More fundamentally, and based on his comprehensive approach to security issues in East Asia, the author doubts that the strengthening of the Japan-U.S...