Japan's National Identity and Foreign Policy: Russia as Japan's "Other" (review)

I consider this volume dealing with the Japanese perception of Russia and written by a young non-Japanese scholar, on the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation submitted to the London School of Economics, an epoch-making masterpiece. Bukh is interested in Japan's relations with the USSR/Russia during the post-World War II period. His main focus lies in Japanese national identity, not the so-called Northern Territories (NT) dispute per se. His book, however, has to deal, at least indirectly, with that thorny territorial dispute precisely because the debate has become a symbolic manifestation of the social culture of the USSR/Russia, which is Bukh's major interest.

I strongly endorse Bukh's constructivist approaches to Japan's relations with the USSR/Russia. During the cold war era, the Soviet Union refused to comply with Japan's request for the return of the Northern Territories (as they are referred to by the Japanese, or the Southern Kuriles as referred to by the Russians—in either case, the Habomai group of islets and the islands of Shikotan, Kunashiri, and Etorofu off the northeast coast of Hokkaido) due to political and military reasons. There were no grounds for the Soviet Union to agree to handing over the islands to Japan, a country that has been closely tied to the United States of America, the USSR's arch-enemy, particularly considering the military-strategic value that these disputed islands had for the Soviet Union during the cold war. In geostrategic terms for the USSR, these islands occupied a crucially important place as a "sanctuary," from which the Soviet military could fire submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SSBNs) at any target in North America west of the Great Lakes. For the purpose of protecting this valuable "bastion" for Soviet nuclear submarines (SLBMs) against penetration by U.S. attack submarines, various facilities (sonar/radar equipment and airfields, with Russian marines and other personnel to operate them) were installed east of the disputed islands. These measures were entirely a matter of Soviet-U.S. relations, not necessarily prompted by Japan's intentions or actions.

The end of the cold war, that is, the demise of ideological, political, and particularly military confrontation between the USSR and the United States, together with other dramatic developments in the international arena that followed—as Bukh points out in his book—have posed significant challenges to the dominance of "rational choice" theory in international relations (IR). The rationalist theory cannot fully explain why the USSR/ Russia has stubbornly refused to return the Northern Territories to Japan even after the end of the cold war. Tuomas Forsberg, a Finnish expert on border and territorial disputes, for instance, argues: "The most common theoretical schools of discipline [IR], namely neorealism and neoliberalism, which direct attention to power relations and national interests, can only with difficulty explain the [Northern Territories] issues at stake." Instead, Forsberg suggests "the need to consider explanations that are linked to the latest challenger of these schools, namely constructivism."¹

To my knowledge, Forsberg has not tried to apply the constructivist approach to the NT dispute, probably because he modestly regards himself not as a specialist on Russo-Japanese relations. I was greatly impressed by valuable suggestions made in Forsberg's essay, although I also have not tried to use a constructivist approach to the NT dispute. This is why I particularly admire Bukh's efforts to achieve his main goal of applying a constructivist approach to Japan's perception of Russia.

Since there is neither space nor need to introduce here all of the arguments and discoveries contained in Bukh's volume, I limit myself to summarizing the major thrust of his studies. In the construction of the Japanese cognition of "self," Bukh argues, the Russians, as well as the Ainu, have played significant roles as "others."

Japan and Russia in the Japanese perception tend to be identified as different from Western...