Norms, Interests, and Power in Japanese Foreign Policy (review)

Realpolitik, with its focus on power, national interest, and the systemic environment, has reigned as the orthodoxy in explanations of Japanese foreign policy. This is understandable since the cold war seems alive and well in East Asia. Sino—Japanese rivalry; contentious territorial and resource disputes; the North Korean nuclear threat; the seemingly eternal presence of the U.S. 7th Fleet in the Taiwan Strait; the wrangling over U.S. military bases; the expansion of security arrangements between Japan, Australia, and India—all seem to validate the appropriateness and strength of the realist explanation of interstate relations in East Asia.

Realism does not produce a uniform picture of Japan, however. It comes in many flavors. Off the top our heads, we can identify diverse variations of realism, including realism that Eric Heginbotham and Richard Samuels call pragmatic "dual hedging" mercantile, Jennifer Lind's militarily strong" buck—passing," Michael Green's" reluctant," Michael Blaker's diplomatically" coping," Kent Calder's economically reactive, Christopher Hughes's on-the-verge-of-normality, Daniel Kliman's born—again, and Kenneth Pyle's never—died classical realism.¹ Despite realism's comparatively clear-cut tenets , Japan specialists still find it necessary to adapt their conceptualization to fit their nuanced view of realist Japan.

It is not as if the normative dimension has been totally absent. In the 1990s, we note the call for values promotion more in the writings of practitioners and policy wonks than of academics. For example, both Ozawa Ichirō's "normal nation" and Funabashi Yōichi's "global civilian power" envisioned the promotion of international norms, ranging from UN—legitimized peacekeeping operations to international human rights. Much has been made recently of then Foreign Minister Asō Tarō's "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" that envisions a collection of states based on a shared liberal democratic ideology.² However, the norms in normal nation and civilian power seemed to fade with the frequent and far-reaching dispatches of the Self Defense Force after Gulf War I. And Asō's "Arc of Freedom and Prosperity" included members neither free nor prosperous, thus raising suspicions that the arc was built on a realist motive that targeted China and North Korea.

Against the array of realist variations, there were a few, though influential, variations of normative frameworks. Most of this conceptualization focused on strategic culture, pacifism, and antimilitarism. Recently, soft power and soft diplomacy are popular themes among both academics and policymakers, including topics such as manga, anime, and Japanese cuisine. And more recently, human security appears as a candidate to become "Japan's norm."³ However, until the volume under review, few case studies have rigorously tested normative approaches theoretically, expansively, comparatively, and in depth.

Norms, Interests, and Power in Japanese Foreign Policy is an ambitious attempt to explore the utility of norm—based explanations of Japanese diplomacy. The study helps tilt the balance away from realism by pitting the ideational frameworks rooted in liberalism and constructivism against rationalist, materialist explanations. On the other hand, it also attempts to keep the scales in balance by integrating appropriate realist tenets with the predominant nonrealist theories, thus bringing the study of Japanese foreign policy into the mainstream of the theoretical discourse in the field of international relations. The book is a welcome, rigorously researched, and thought—provoking contribution to the study of a Japanese foreign policy in transition. And it is about time. There must be some way other than power considerations to explain the Japanese government's appointment of a manga character, Do—raemon, as a special envoy and three teenagers as "cute ambassadors."

The editors, Yoichiro Sato and Keiko Hirata, have recruited an excellent cast of characters to analyze clusters of cases dealing with security, international political economy, and environmental issues. The volume is kaleidoscopic in scope, but the authors have tried to concentrate on the relative utility of constructivism in particular as the main alternative explanation to realism. The cases...