The Pendulum Swings toward a Rising Sun

[ 188 ] asia policy The Pendulum Swings toward a Rising Sun T.J. Pempel In the late 1980s, when Japan’s economic boom hit its high point of “irrational exuberance,” the West seemed able to find plausible any tale concoctedbyanycharlatanwhohadspenttwoweeksinJapan.Foragluttonous and gullible West, alleged links between samurai swordsmanship and justin -time management seemed no less improbable than analysis of jujitsu as a guarantee that the “land of the rising sun” would dominate the 21st century. The popping of Japan’s economic bubble soon displaced that of triumphalist champagne corks. Global insouciance ushered in a wave of “Japan passing” that was combined with a love-hate fascination with a rapidly growing China that might be a new source of economic dynamism—or a perfidious military threat. Thesetwobooks,eachbyaforemostauthorityonJapan,markanewswing of the pendulum. Gone, each argues, is the Japan of the Yoshida Doctrine premised as it was on high economic growth and passivity in global affairs. “Checkbook diplomacy” and “free rides” on defense have been replaced by a Japanese foreign policy that is conspicuously more robust, more militaryfocused , and more nationalistic. Neither Kenneth Pyle nor Richard Samuels gives credibility to those who dismiss Japan and its foreign policies as irrational, passive, or lacking in strategic thought. Instead, these two authors present rich and compatible, though unique, portraits of Japanese strategic history, demonstrating the overarching rationality behind Japan’s shifting policies. Pyle, as the historian, devotes roughly two-thirds of his analysis to Japan’s policies during the Meiji period, the liberal 1920s, World War II, and the early postwar period, showing how Japanese elites adapted to changing external environments in the pragmatic pursuit of national wealth and power. Today, he argues, Japan is in the midst of yet the latest adaptation, this time to the new post–Cold War environment, where, particularly in East Asia, the challenges from a nuclear North Korea and a “rising China” provide the stimulus behind a resurgent Japan. Samuels’ sensitivity to historical roots plays out in his analysis of ongoing coalitional dances among domestic political competitors whom T.J. Pempel is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where from 2001 to 2006 he also served as Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies. The author of twelve books and over 100 scholarly articles, he is currently at work on a manuscript on U.S. foreign policy toward Asia. He can be reached at . [ 189 ] book review roundtable • japan rising & securing japan he sees as the key shapers of Japanese foreign policy. Samuels shows how new ideological configurations are today combining to produce what I have elsewhere called the “regime shift” that underpins Japan’s new grand strategy. While Pyle italicizes the underlying rationality of eventual Japanese security choices, Samuels teases out precisely how competing Japanese elites put forward alternatives that can offer equal, though dramatically different, claims to rationality. What shapes Japan’s choices, Samuels contends, are changing norms and identities and their power in the country’s ongoing policy discourse. In his words, “collectively held understandings of social life and national aspiration are not bequeathed by history but [are] forged and reforged in the crucible of political debate” (p. 187). As a consequence, Samuels places emphasis on how political entrepreneurs are now using these understandings to sell their own preferences for a post-Yoshida “Goldilocks consensus” that gets things “just right.” To even the most jaded Japan watcher, each book offers page after page of insightful nuggets on specific facets of Japanese power and strategy, including the enhanced influence of a new generation of Japanese politicians born after World War II. A major focus in both books is the U.S.-Japan relationship. There Pyle is more sanguine than Samuels. Pyle sees the alliance—albeit in a more symmetrical reconfiguration than at present—as the pillar for a stable Asian region and the pivot for a trilateral relationship among Japan, China, and the United States. Samuels, in contrast, underscores the open debate about the alliance now going on in Japan, noting that there are those who see the United States as posing “as great a threat to Japan as any hostile neighbor” (p. 151). Moreover, though neither says it so bluntly...