The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–1964 by Jessamyn R. Abel (review)

One of the main trends in international history in recent years has been the growing interest in the evolution of internationalism in terms of both its practice and its intellectual development. In regard to Japanese international relations, this has led to a number of important studies, including Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–45 (Routledge, 2002); Thomas Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order, 1914–1938 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008); and Liang Pan, The United Nations in Japan’s Foreign and Security Policymaking, 1945–1992 (Harvard University Press, 2005). All of these have illuminated the degree to which liberals viewed international organizations as necessary and useful adjuncts to Japan’s national interests. Jessamyn Abel in The International Minimum builds on this foundation and merges it with another significant historiographical shift, the increasing interest in cultural and public diplomacy, in order to shed new light on both the 1930s and the postwar period.

Abel’s intention in this study is to demonstrate that one can use the cultural aspects of internationalism as a prism to uncover significant transwar continuities in Japan’s interactions with the outside world. As she rightly observes in her introduction, the opposite of internationalism is not ultranationalism but isolation, and even in the 1930s and early 1940s Japan never desired the latter. Instead, what we find by looking at these years is that Japan began during this period to learn the language and practice of internationalism. Subsequently, this pedagogical experience came to fruition in the postwar period when the country used cultural diplomacy as one means of restoring itself to a position of respectability within the international community. Abel traces the evolution of Japan’s adoption of and adaptation to cultural internationalism through a number of case studies—the establishment of the Kokusai Bunka Shinkōkai (KBS), its bids to host the Olympic Games in 1940 and 1964, and its interaction with Asian regionalism at the Tokyo and Bandung conferences of 1943 and 1955, respectively.

There is a great deal of interesting material in this volume. The introductory chapters provide a useful overview of Japan’s changing relationship with internationalism, noting how it was an enthusiastic member of the League of Nations up to 1931 and then of the United Nations following its successful bid for membership in 1956. As Abel observes, Japan’s positive involvement with these organizations very largely arose from, first, an understanding of the need to adapt itself to changing international practice and, second, a belief that the latter could be used to enhance the country’s security and other national interests. In other words, its willingness to associate itself with internationalism did not come about as a result of altruism but rather because this creed could be used to forward Japan’s own international agenda. This is a penetrating and useful observation, which could have been taken further by noting how Japan attempted to use the concept of self-determination to legitimize the establishment of Manchukuo.

Abel sees this self-serving interpretation of normative change manifesting itself in the way Japan adopted the instruments of cultural diplomacy. The KBS, as she sees it, was an organization designed to stress Japan’s contribution to world culture in the hope of enhancing its presence in the world arena. Similarly, Japan’s diplomatic efforts in 1936 to persuade the International Olympic Committee to choose Tokyo as the host for the 1940 games were primarily a bid to heighten its international prestige. At the same time, though, she argues that there was also a domestic agenda for both initiatives, in that greater international recognition would, in turn, stimulate national pride and solidarity and help in the drive toward modernization. Provocatively, she identifies the same priorities at play in the bid to host...