Doing Fieldwork in Japan

In Search of the Japanese State

My first research trip to Japan was in 1989, when I set out to do my Ph.D. dissertation. Japan was not unfamiliar, but the task of doing research was. I had studied the Japanese language at Sophia University and had lived in Tokyo for more than a year as an undergraduate. I was excited to return, but that excitement was tempered by the unknowns ahead. I was setting out to research Japan’s national security policy, a policy cloaked in secrecy in almost any state. But in Japan, this was an issue that also inevitably conjured up images of a past Japan, a Japan very different from the bright postwar image of the world’s only “economic superpower.” It seemed then that I was venturing into mysterious and unexplored territory, and while I had some basic ideas of where to start, the journey was to be much longer than I imagined. Although I did not know it then, I was about to witness a series of changes that would transform Japan’s security policy debates. The Cold War was about to end, and in the years that followed, the relationship between Japan’s long-time ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, and the bureaucrats s h e i l a a . s m i t h In Search of the Japanese State Sheila A. Smith on the stern of an MSDF destroyer during antisubmarine warfare exercises in Tokyo Bay. who had crafted Japan’s security policy was also about to be transformed. The puzzle that needed explanation at the end of the 1980s was Japan’s resistance to change. I was looking to understand the well-advertised “taboos” and wanted to find out more about the one institution that seemed strangely missing from policy deliberations—Japan’s military. Within several years, however, many of the taboos were being broken, and Japan’s military had come out from the shadows and on to the front burner of Japan’s foreign policy debates. When I began my research, there was relatively little discussion of Japan in the academic literature on international security. In fact, like many fields, much of the theoretical work had been focused on European experience, and with some notable exceptions, there was little empirical work done on how Asian states (and their societies) were affected by the Cold War. Japan was absent, too, from the key policy debates of the Cold War. It was not a nuclear power, and there was little evidence that Japan’s security specialists were as worried about the strategic dilemmas of alliance with the United States as their counterparts in Europe. Moreover, Japan’s distinction as a state that had renounced war seemed to sit awkwardly with theories about the global nuclear balance, or even about the politics of grand strategic alliances. As I set off to explore the Japanese state and its strategic impulses, it was this contradictory set of images that troubled me. I wanted to know how Japan organized its military given the postwar constitutional proscription on the use of force by the state. How did a government that was not allowed to use force to “settle international disputes” go about designing, equipping, and deploying a military? What was the purpose of such a military, and how did it factor into Japan’s broader foreign policy goals? I assumed that Japan, like every other state, must have a process for developing strategy and articulating a national interest. I also assumed that Japan’s military would be a constitutive element of this process. I thought that I only had to interview security-policy decision makers (including the elusive Japanese military) and observe the interplay between jousting policy advocates and I would be able to come up with the factors that determined the Japanese state’s security goals. So with questions and notebook in hand, I took aim at the institutions responsible for security policy formation. Gaining access to the Japanese Defense Agency and Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Japan’s political and military leadership took much time and patience. Ultimately, I was very fortunate , but there were indications in many of my interviews that I needed to In Search of the Japanese State | 157 reconsider the way I had envisioned the roles of some crucial actors. I also had to contend with the persistent claim that two factors I had not fully appreciated were key to Japan’s security...