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[ 191 ] book review roundtable • japan rising & securing japan Change in Japan’s Grand Strategy: Why and How Much? Mike M. Mochizuki The authors of these excellent books on Japanese grand strategy traverse beyond their home disciplines. The historian Kenneth B. Pyle explains shifts in Japan by applying a political science theory that argues that the international system shapes a country’s domestic institutions as well as its external behavior. The political scientist Richard J. Samuels places the current Japanese debates about strategy in a broad historical context to “connect the ideological dots” of national discourse over nearly 150 years of history. Both books seek to assess the degree and nature of change in Japanese strategy, to explain this change, and to suggest where Japan might be headed. Although there is much about which Pyle and Samuels agree, there are also some significant differences. Both Pyle and Samuels embrace the virtually unanimous consensus among Japan scholars that Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru established the basic parameters of Japan’s post–World War II foreign policy during the peace negotiations with the United States. The two authors show how during the 1950s and 1960s Yoshida’s shrewd diplomatic tactics were transformed into a grand strategy. This transformation was achieved by grounding “mercantile realism” (Pyle, pp. 212, 256–62) in robust domestic institutions, by adopting explicit brakes on Japan’s defense policies (what Samuels calls “baking the pacifist loaf” in chapter 2) so as to resist U.S. pressures on Japan to make greater military contributions to the alliance, and by forging a new national consensus. Although much of this ground has been covered by other writings, these two books provide a clear and readable account of the emergence and impact of this so-called Yoshida Doctrine. It is in their respective analyses of  The concept of “mercantile realism” was developed in Eric Heginbotham and Richard J. Samuels, “Mercantile Realism and Japanese Foreign Policy,” International Security 22, no. 4 (Spring 1998): 171–203.  For example, see John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience 1878–1954 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Richard B. Finn, Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era (Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 1996); Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Michael Schaller, Altered States: the United States and Japan Since the Occupation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Mike M. Mochizuki holds the Japan-U.S. Relations Chair in Memory of Gaston Sigur at the Elliott School of International Affairs in George Washington University. He is currently completing a book entitled A New Strategic Triangle: the U.S.-Japan Alliance and the Rise of China. He can be reached at . [ 192 ] asia policy how Japan appears to be moving away from this grand strategy, however, that Pyle and Samuels make their mark. In Pyle’s view, the end of the Cold War brought about the unraveling of the Yoshida Doctrine—both in economic and military dimensions. Economically, the end of autarkic communist regimes fueled economic globalization that in turn exposed the structural weaknesses of the Japanese economy and the need for Japan to move beyond catch-up developmental capitalism. Militarily, the collapse of the Soviet Union yielded a more uncertain and fluid security environment in which Japan’s “cheap ride” on the U.S. security guarantee became less viable—even though Japan continued to host U.S. military bases and forces. The first post–Cold War international crisis, the 1990–91 Persian Gulf War, revealed the diplomatic risks and reputational costs of Japan’s pacifism. The North Korean nuclear crisis, which emerged because of the post–Cold War reconfiguration of major power alignments, confirmed that Japan not only depended on the United States for its own defense, but also could ill afford to be a passive security bystander. Therefore, rather than resisting U.S. expectations that Japan do more for regional and global security (as Japan had done under Yoshida and his followers), Japan began to embrace greater bilateral defense cooperation and...

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