Masculinity and Japan’s Foreign Relations by Yumiko Mikanagi (review)

Let me begin with a confession. This is one of those books that I would love to have researched and written myself. As a result, this review runs the perennial risk that plagues bad book reviews of simply bemoaning the fact that the book under review is not the one the reviewer would have produced. So, while resisting this urge and remembering the fact that books should always be reviewed on their own terms, I would recommend this slim and stimulating volume to anyone interested in new ways to think about Japan’s role in the world.

Mikanagi’s objective in the book is to explore a world dominated by men, that of politics and policymaking, and to ask the seemingly straightforward question of “[i]f foreign policy is made by a group of (mostly) men, is the ‘way of being a man’ [in other words, masculinity] connected to how these men envision foreign relations and formulate foreign policy” (p. 1). To answer this question, the book is structured in six concise and easily digested chapters. The first substantial chapter sets two scenes by reviewing the literature related to the development of Japan’s foreign policy and that relating to gender and masculinity. On the one hand, it presents the well-known narrative of Japan as an anomaly in our understanding of how states behave: despite its impressive postwar economic growth, Japan maintained a low-profile, reactive stance in the fields of foreign and defense policy leading to accusations of free riding. How it should respond to the Persian Gulf War of 1990–91 represented the challenge that set the tone for the next two decades of incremental activism on the part of the Japanese government and the Self Defense Forces (SDF) toward normalization. Mikanagi sieves this narrative through the conventional international relations (IR) theories to reiterate the extant literature’s understandings of Japan’s role in the world. So far, so widely accepted. On the other hand, the chapter briefly reviews the feminist IR literature starting naturally with Cynthia Enloe’s work, identifying various gender biases in the way IR is written and establishing in the reader’s mind the concept of hegemonic masculinity, which has proved to be a very fruitful approach since its initial articulations in the early 1980s, although Mikanagi prefers for good reason to use the term “dominant masculinity” to denote “a set of symbols, attributes, behaviors, lifestyles and values agreed to by large numbers of people in a given society as manly and ideal” (p. 19).

With these understandings in mind, the following chapters collectively shift the focus toward a historical review of the dominant masculinities among Japanese elite policymakers from the Meiji period via World War II through to the postwar period and present day. Based on this history, Mikanagi develops a typology of dominant Japanese masculinities across time that are seen to map neatly onto the vacillations in Japan’s foreign policy from active to passive and tentatively back again. These five dominant masculinities identified are: (1) haikara, the “civilized,” “enlightened,” and “Westernized” masculinity of the early Meiji period that stood in stark distinction to that of the samurai warrior, or bushi; (2) bankara, which sought to restore the bushi masculinity in response to the haikara form of masculinity and successfully came to replace it by the end of the nineteenth century, coinciding with Japan’s wars against China and Russia; (3) kyōyōshugi, or self-cultivation principle, that came to the fore in the early twentieth century and represented a turn from the physical manliness of bankara back to the more cultivated masculinity of haikara; (4) alongside the militarization of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, kyōyōshugi was replaced by a form of masculinity that regarded “men-as-soldiers” loyal to the emperor both in body and spirit; and finally (5) the salaryman masculinity that filled the void left by the “men-as-soldiers” form of masculinity after...