Japan’s Maritime Security Strategy: The Japan Coast Guard and Maritime Outlaws by Lindsay Black (review)

Japan’s evolving security policy has received increasing scholarly coverage in recent years, with much of the literature dominated by contending varieties of realism and constructivism, and generally pointing respectively toward either greater militarization or continuing adherence to norms of antimilitarism. Lindsay Black’s volume makes a useful contribution to this debate, by bringing in what is in the case of Japan an often underutilized theory in the shape of the English School and by looking at the relatively understudied theme of the role of the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) in maritime security. The book makes a range of important arguments to challenge, and ultimately nuance, the existing literature, if never quite succeeding in its aim of really challenging much of the dominant orthodoxy. But it deserves to be read widely for its good use of theory combined with much interesting new empirical information.

The central theoretical contention of the volume—expounded in the first three chapters—is that the English School, and its attendant emphasis on institutions and norms to create a functioning society of states, provides insights that can help explain the workings of the international system and Japan’s international behavior within it. While Black accepts the main tenets of the English School, he argues that the theory at times falls into a postcolonial perspective in assuming that the adoption of Western institutions and norms has gone unchallenged in other regions. Instead, he posits that each region interprets and creates its own norms to help create international society. Japan is no exception to this, being sentient to regional norms and seeking to innovate in them in order to help establish regional order. In turn, Black examines the ways in which states that depart from international norms may be labeled as “outlaws” and the strategies by which other states seek to bring them back into the international and regional order through condemnation or engaging via compliance with institutions and norms. The author demonstrates in particular how this process has worked in the case of North Korea’s alleged transgressions of the international maritime regime, the response to piracy in the Gulf of Aden, and piracy in Southeast Asia.

This lengthy theoretical and scene-setting exegesis is then followed by three shorter empirical chapters focusing on JCG involvement in responding to North Korea’s 1999 and 2001 “suspicious ships” incursions, the dispatch of the Maritime Self-Defense Force (MSDF) and elements of the JCG to the Gulf of Aden, and the role of the JCG in U.S.-led efforts post-9/11 in antiterrorism and weapons-of-mass-destruction counterproliferation. Each of these chapters, and especially the first two of the three, provides fascinating detail, never collated before in one volume, to examine Japanese policy. The chapters demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations and much work on the JCG to date, Japan has not necessarily employed its coast guard as a vanguard of remilitarization efforts. Instead, Japanese policymakers, despite these obvious opportunities to utilize the JCG to presage a role of the MSDF, have preferred to maintain Japan’s contribution at the level of the civilian JCG. They have been extremely attentive to regional norms and institutions rather than acceding to, for example, U.S. pressures for a more overt military response. Hence, the volume demonstrates its arguments that rather than just following a logic of remilitarization, or just the logic of constructivism and rigid adherence to antimilitarism, Japan has charted a course in maritime security that enables a contribution to the international order but has been mediated by regional circumstances. The result is to demonstrate considerable concordance with the English School model, which is often seen to offer a way to mediate among realism, constructivism, and other theoretical models.

The volume is thus very effective in putting across its key arguments and giving those following realist or constructivist logics some pause for thought about the certainty of their...