Domestic Power Transitions and Japan’s Evolving Strategic Posture, 2006 to 2012
Japan has experienced two historic power transitions in the past decade that have underpinned Japan’s security renaissance, one international, one domestic. As discussed in chapter 3, Japan’s regional security environment was fundamentally transformed as China’s economic rank surpassed that of Japan’s, China’s military spending ballooned, and other states in the region pursued new strategies to adjust to this regional power transition. Equally important to Japan’s security renaissance, however, Japan also experienced a power transition at home—with the collapse of public support for over five decades of conservative rule under the LDP and the victory of the rival DPJ in a historic Lower House election in August 2009—the first time since the LDP was created in 1955 that another political party won more seats in a national election than the LDP.1
The primary reasons for this domestic power transition are rooted in domestic issues but are linked to Japan’s place in the world and its broader security practices. Moreover, this domestic power transition formed an essential component of Japan’s security renaissance, marking the first time since Japan’s defeat in World War II that the ruling party and primary opposition party shared a broad consensus on Japan’s appropriate military security policies and practices—despite substantially different approaches to the three historical legacies that continue to shape Japan’s security renaissance. As discussed in chapter 2, there were important political and policy precursors to Japan’s security renaissance in earlier periods, but the six years examined in this chapter cemented Japan’s security renaissance in place, setting the stage for a further series of enhanced military capabilities and practices that would be implemented under the subsequent government of Shinzō Abe after his (and the LDP’s) return to power in December 2012. Contemporary reporting on Japanese security policy evolution under the second Abe administration that began in December 2012 often ascribes the primary impetus for change to Abe himself, but as demonstrated in this chapter, the root of much of Japan’s security renaissance lies in the period 2006 to 2012, which included five prime ministers in addition to Abe.
In these years, the political opposition that came to power adopted a new NDPG that shifted the JSDF southward toward China, increased its capabilities, enhanced Japan’s participation in global counterpiracy operations, continued Japan’s role as the largest funder of Afghanistan reconstruction efforts beyond the United States, and led to greatly escalated military tensions with China over the disputed Senkaku Islands. Security cooperation with regional partners such as Australia, India, and ASEAN countries also reached unprecedented levels in these six years. While Prime Minister Abe pushed practices further in this direction upon his return to power in December 2012, there is every reason to think that Japan’s security policies, and its security renaissance, would have proceeded similarly under DPJ prime minister Yoshihiko Noda (who lost power in the December 2012 election to the LDP) or a future DPJ prime minister. In sum, to fully appreciate the extent of Japan’s security renaissance, one must consider security policy change beyond Shinzō Abe—which requires a close examination of the period between his two terms as prime minister, an aim of this chapter.
The six years from September 2006 to December 2012 did not unfold as observers of Japanese politics or security policy expected. In September 2006, popular LDP prime minister Jun’ichiro Koizumi passed the baton of leadership to his anointed successor, Shinzō Abe, who had been instrumental in crafting security policy in the Koizumi administration first as deputy chief and later as chief cabinet secretary. Koizumi resigned despite his continued strong popularity, and it was expected that Abe would build on Koizumi’s efforts to expand Japanese security capabilities and activities.2 Although among prime ministers in the preceding fifteen years, only Koizumi had managed to serve for more than three years, many expected that Abe would continue in Koizumi’s footsteps in this area as well and would serve at least three years as prime minister, further adding continuity to Japan’s recent efforts to adapt its security policy and practices for the challenges of the new century.
The year that followed, however, departed greatly from the expected script: in July 2007 (after Abe had been in office only ten months) the LDP lost control of the Upper House (the less-powerful house of Japan’s parliament), which created a divided government, or what the Japanese media termed a twisted Diet (nejiri kokkai), for the first time under the postwar constitution that established in 1946 the current division of power between the two houses of the Diet.3 In September 2007 Abe resigned as prime minister, reportedly for health reasons, though pressure to resign after the poor showing in the Upper House election and the low popularity ratings of his cabinet also surely contributed to this decision. In the following two years, two more LDP prime ministers (Yasuo Fukuda and Tarō Asō) also served for only one year. Then, in a historic moment in postwar Japanese politics, the LDP lost the Lower House election to another party for the first time since the LDP was formed in 1955, to the rival DPJ. As with the first Abe government, however, the DPJ also enjoyed less than one year of control of both houses of the Diet, losing control over the Upper House in July 2010. The period of the twisted Diet and annual turnover of prime ministers continued until December 2012, when Abe led the LDP to an electoral victory in the Lower House and returned to the prime ministership. An LDP victory in the subsequent July 2013 Upper House election offered the likelihood of LDP control over both houses of the Diet until at least July 2016 (the next required national election, of the Upper House), together with its coalition partner, the Kōmei Party. An early surprise Lower House election in December 2014 further cemented LDP-coalition control of the Diet.
The six-year period considered in this chapter features the debut of Prime Minister Abe’s security agenda, in his first term as prime minister. Moreover, beginning in September 2009, these years offer only the second opportunity in the entire postwar period to examine whether security practices created and institutionalized under the LDP would endure after a new political party took over the reins of power, the first being the short-lived anti-LDP coalition government of 1993–94 that lasted only nine months.
Substantial media reporting predicted great breaks from past security practice during these tumultuous years of political turnover—from revision of Article Nine of the constitution under the first Abe administration to a wholesale recrafting of the US-Japan military alliance under the first DPJ Hatoyama administration. However, while the period indeed saw many important changes in Japan’s security practices, it did not see substantial success in implementing policies contrary to the long-standing historical legacies of policies rooted in antimilitarist security practices and the US-Japan alliance.
Contrary to expectations, the once-opposition then ruling-party DPJ embraced the vast majority of the security policies and approaches previously adopted by the LDP, marking a historic moment in Japanese security politics, a moment where the ruling coalition and opposition coalition expressed substantial agreement about the general contours of Japan’s security policies. Although some individual politicians of both major parties continue to disagree with some aspects of their party’s mainstream positions, the consensus compromise legislation and practices illustrated striking continuity of outcomes—despite many instances of concern expressed that this would not be the case.
Growing concern over Japan’s regional security environment was evident throughout this period, in particular Japan’s growing sense of insecurity vis-à-vis China. The first concerted policy responses to military concerns of a rising China were developed internally in the LDP governments of Abe, Fukuda, and Asō and crafted into a new draft NDPG in 2009. Before this new NDPG could be formally adopted, however, the LDP lost control of the Diet, and the DPJ took over the reins of power. Over the course of the next year, as discussed in chapter 3, the security situation vis-à-vis China worsened, with China’s GDP surpassing Japan’s to become the second-largest economy in the world and the first of what would become a series of escalating disputes over control over the Senkaku Islands in the fall of 2010.
In sum, what was expected in this period vis-à-vis security policy was twofold: (1) different LDP prime ministers would have different policy priorities given their different faction ideologies in the LDP and (2) opposition parties in control would alter the guiding parameters of Japanese security policy in important ways. What resulted in this period, however, confounded expectations: despite some different policy priorities of different prime ministers, there was much continuity in the area of security policy outcomes. Moreover, the years of opposition control (three years of DPJ-led governments) led to the most significant changes cementing Japan’s security renaissance in the six-year period of frequent turnover examined in this chapter, laying the foundation for further security policy innovation in the second Abe administration, examined in chapter 5.
The 2010 NDPG adopted by the DPJ government in December marked a substantial change to Japan’s long-standing regional security posture—to the extent that it was widely characterized both within and outside Japan as a dramatic break from the past. Indeed, although the new NDPG released by the Abe government in December 2013 received substantial coverage as another example of Abe’s push to craft a more active security role for Japan abroad, it is the 2010 NDPG that introduced most of the core concepts that the 2013 NDPG seeks to further advance—such as “dynamic defense,” increased capabilities for the JSDF, the “southwestern shift” of the JSDF to respond to the increased China threat, relaxations on arms export restrictions and joint weapons production, and the strategic use of ODA for military-related purposes.4
How can we explain these surprising outcomes? Two primary drivers take center stage: First is the growing impact of a changed international environment—which was a factor in the previous decade but grew much stronger in the decade of Japan’s security renaissance.5 Second, the historical legacies of the postwar period strongly influenced leaders from both parties in their efforts to address challenges emerging from a changed international environment. The postwar antimilitarist legacy provided a well-trodden path difficult to deviate from, one that was popular with the public and highly institutionalized—constraining political actors on the right and on the left. The postwar historical legacy of struggles with inequality in the US-Japan alliance also played a strong role. The United States continued to strongly push Japan to enhance military capabilities and deepen cooperation with the United States within the alliance framework. The United States also served as a bulwark against the DPJ government, at times secretly in coalition with senior bureaucrats who opposed the new policy initiatives of the DPJ and working together with the LDP opposition. This behind-the-scenes work contributed to the downfall of the first DPJ government of Yukio Hatoyama. Later, though, strong coordination with the United States assisted the next DPJ prime minister, Naoto Kan, two times: over the 2010 Fishing Trawler Incident related to the Senkaku Islands and coping with the triple disaster of March 2011. DPJ attempts to alter the long-standing postwar dynamics over history issues related to Japan’s colonialist and militarist periods also were not as successful as many expected them to be given the priority the party placed on addressing long-lingering history issues in its campaign manifestos.
Beyond the strong influence of the three historical legacies, three additional explanatory factors are evident in this period: (1) changing public and elite opinion linked to the dramatically changed international environment; (2) continuing stresses on the old party system after the implementation of the new electoral system in the 1996 election, one decade earlier, which led to a large rise of so-called floating voters (unaffiliated with any party) and a pummeling of the LDP faction system (including by Koizumi and as a result of a series of other institutional changes); and (3) weak or inexperienced leaders more influenced by experienced and entrenched interests. Each of these factors is examined in this chapter as facets of the developing security renaissance during these important six years.
Disagreement over Japan’s future security policies was not the central issue leading to the frequent turnover of political leadership in the six-year period examined in this chapter, but it did play a contributing role. The next section explains the broader context for the annual leadership turnover seen in these six years and for the historic domestic power transition to DPJ rule in 2009. This next section also includes a brief overview of the institutional structure of Japan’s parliamentary style of democracy, which creates more frequent leadership turnover than a US-style presidential system. Next, efforts of the first Abe administration to alter long-standing constraints on Japanese security policy are explained, offering an argument for why such efforts failed, followed by consideration of the efforts of Abe’s two short-term successors, Yasuo Fukuda and Tarō Asō. Then the chapter examines the important domestic power transition to DPJ rule and its effect on Japan’s security practices—beginning with the challenge the first DPJ prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, posed to the US-Japan alliance legacy and continuing through the subsequent two DPJ prime ministers, Naoto Kan and Yoshihiko Noda. The chapter concludes with a summary discussion of how Japan’s security renaissance was cemented in this period, offering a transition to the further transformation of Japan’s security posture from 2012 to 2016 in the second Abe administration after the return of LDP rule.
Leadership Turnover and Security Policy Change: Confounding Expectations
Japan’s parliamentary system creates more frequent leadership turnover than the US presidential system. With Lower House elections mandated at least every four years, on a date chosen by the prime minister, the incentive for the ruling party is to lock in support when public opinion is favorable and to weather periods of low support. This logic had led to Lower House elections being conducted on average every 2.6 years in the postwar period 1946 to 2015.6 While the timing of Lower House elections is not directly related to turnover of prime ministers, there is a correlation between the two—with standing prime ministers frequently resigning after a poor showing in a national election, or even before an election if public opinion suggests that the party needs to present a new face and image to voters prior to the election. In addition, prime ministers may resign at other times because of a poor showing in an Upper House election (where half the seats are elected every three years), declining support rates, a political scandal, or other factors. Thus, the average term of a prime minister in postwar Japan is less than the average time between Lower House elections, only 2.1 years.7 This makes the annual turnover of prime ministers from 2006 to 2012 exceptional but not unprecedented; for example, Japan had nine different prime ministers in the first decade of the post–Cold War era from 1989 to 1999.
Postwar Japan has seen only six prime ministers who served over twice the average term length of 2.1 years: Shigeru Yoshida (over seven years), Hayato Ikeda (about four and a half years), Eisaku Satō (about eight years), Yasuhiro Nakasone (about five years), Jun’ichirō Koizumi (about five and a half years), and Shinzō Abe (five years in December 2016). It is notable that each of these prime ministers is known for accomplishments in foreign policy. For example, the Yoshida Doctrine developed during Yoshida’s seven years in office is widely considered to have delineated the boundaries of postwar Japanese foreign policy.8 Ikeda successfully shifted Japanese public attention away from the contentious security treaty revision demonstrations of 1960—thought to be the largest public demonstrations in Japanese history—and onto a focus on high economic growth that would later be described as the “economic miracle.” Satō shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his antinuclear weapons policies and successfully brokered the return of Japan’s Okinawan islands to Japanese administrative control in 1972, twenty years after the occupation of the rest of Japan had ended. Nakasone could be seen as setting the stage for Japan’s more active security policies in the post–Cold War era, expanding JMSDF patrols to one thousand nautical miles from Japan and coordinating Cold War strategy closely with US president Ronald Reagan. The Koizumi era, as discussed in chapter 2, is the focus of numerous studies related to Japan’s so-called normalization.
In the seventy years from 1945 to 2015, Japan has been governed by thirty-three different prime ministers, including two who returned to power after serving previously (Yoshida and Abe). Twenty-two of these were members of the LDP, all but six of the twenty-eight prime ministers who have served since the LDP was created by the merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties in 1955. Seventy years of experience with leadership turnover shows that changes in prime minister frequently led to changes in Japan’s overall foreign policy agenda—from moves to the left (such as under Prime Ministers Miki and Murayama) to moves to the right (such as with Prime Ministers Kishi and Nakasone). It does not require a change in party in power to see change in Japan’s security policies because a change in prime minister can take place at any time.
In the period prior to 2009 and after 1955, however, the LDP was in power for all but nine months. In the one brief nine-month period that the LDP was out of power, there was substantial concern among managers of Japan’s security about a possible fundamental reordering of Japan’s security practices. This short period ended too quickly to test what the impact of a non-LDP government would be in the area of security policy, however. Thus, with no substantial experience of non-LDP rule over the vast majority of the postwar period, there was worry in the Japanese defense establishment and in the United States of the possible effect of the rise to power of a DPJ government as LDP popularity plummeted under Prime Minister Asō in 2009 and a Lower House election was imminent. In the United States, some of this worry was owing to the minimal outreach by the United States to the DPJ prior to its rise to power. There is also some evidence that the DPJ itself resisted the minimal outreach that was pursued, which in itself concerned the United States.
By contrast, the expectation in the waning months of the Koizumi period was that Abe would continue and deepen the security policies of his predecessor and mentor, further pushing the envelope of antimilitarist principles and further strengthening the US-Japan alliance based on a template announced with great fanfare in 2006 in a Koizumi-Bush joint statement. There was even talk of constitutional revision of Article Nine—as set out in the LDP draft constitution circulated in November 2005, which followed the model of proposing a specific alternative as the right-of-center Yomiuri newspaper had in 1994.9 While there were some initial moves in this expected direction, ultimately this is not the path that transpired under Abe and his LDP successors.
Later in this period there was also the expectation that two years after Abe’s resignation when the DPJ came to power, the DPJ rise would lead to a fundamental reimagining of the US-Japan alliance and of Japan’s security posture more broadly. While, again, there were some initial moves in this direction, this also is not the policy direction that was taken. Instead, the DPJ governments institutionalized Japan’s security renaissance in 2010 with the dual acts of adopting a new NDPG and reaffirming Japan’s commitment to the US-Japan alliance on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the current security treaty, laying a template that Abe would expand upon after his and the LDP’s return to power in December 2012.
Abe 1.0 and His Successors: Declining LDP Support and New Security Initiatives
The three LDP prime ministers to follow Prime Minister Koizumi were not able to expand substantially his security legacy, despite trying. Abe 1.0 (his first attempt at prime minister) tried the hardest and failed the most dramatically. Fukuda took a different approach, more influenced by the postwar antimilitarist legacy, but was fundamentally constrained by the policy paralysis caused by the twisted Diet and the effects of the global financial crisis. Asō advocated policies similar to Abe’s but faced a serious challenge to party control and a forced Lower House election at a time of extremely low public support.
Abe began his term as prime minister as the anointed successor to the popular Koizumi. It can be difficult to follow such a popular leader, but Abe benefited from continued high popularity of the LDP as well. Where the LDP, and Japan as a whole, was not popular was with close neighbors China and South Korea. An early challenge and goal of Abe’s was to repair the diplomatic damage Koizumi had caused with these two states. Abe also faced growing tensions with North Korea from a position of strength in public opinion over his avowed dedication to the abduction issue with North Korea.
Abe came from an illustrious political background. His father, Shintarō Abe, was Japan’s longest-serving foreign minister and early in his career an aide to his father-in-law, Prime Minister Kishi. Shinzō Abe often invokes his grandfather Kishi’s legacy—but less often alludes to his other grandfather, Kan Abe, who also served in the Diet.10 Even more than when Abe returned to power in 2012, Abe’s outspoken nationalist views were a matter of great media and public interest at the time Abe became prime minister in 2006. As chief cabinet secretary under Koizumi, Abe was at the forefront of LDP members advocating a more “balanced” view of Japan’s past history, and he frequently criticized the 1993 Kōnō statement on the comfort women issue and efforts to introduce more detail about Japan’s brutal wartime conduct into history textbooks. He was also an outspoken advocate for constitutional revision of Article Nine and of a renaming of the JSDF to something akin to a National Defense Force.11
From his first days in office, Abe sought to further advance the security-related legacies of the Koizumi era, including increased military capabilities, a deepened US-Japan alliance, and greater global role for the JSDF.12 The MOD was established in the first months of the Abe government (from the former Japan Defense Agency) as a result of legislation passed at the end of the Koizumi administration.
In terms of a broader security strategy—before Japan yet had a formal national security strategy document—Abe sought to advance Japan’s security interests in two ways. First, his administration advocated an “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity” of outreach to Australia, Southeast Asia, and India based on “shared values”—a not-so-subtle exclusion of China.13 As he would in his second administration from 2012, Abe traveled widely to promote these policies. He signed a milestone agreement with Australia for security cooperation and laid the groundwork for a similar deepening of security ties with India. He was the first Japanese prime minister to address NATO. Second, Abe pursued what Daniel Sneider and others have called the Japanese dual hedge, “to maintain the security alliance with the United States while seeking to draw China into a regional and global economic and security structure.”14 Outreach to China and South Korea was not the sole purview of DPJ advocacy. As discussed in chapter 3, Abe’s first foreign trips were to China and South Korea—before even the United States, a departure from standard practice noticed in Washington and across the Asian region.
Abe also attempted to formally revise Article Nine of Japan’s postwar constitution, succeeding in a necessary first step of passing legislation in the Diet that set out the procedure whereby the required second step to constitutional revision, a national referendum on the proposed change, would take place. A national referendum of any kind has never been conducted in Japan, and so there were no procedures in place as to how it would take place if necessary. Even the legislation to set out the formal process for future change caused alarm among many Japanese, and a compromise in the legislation was included such that it would not take effect for a year after passing (at which point, it turns out, Abe was no longer prime minister).
Many of the policy achievements of the second Abe administration (the subject of chapter 5) were raised in his first term in office but not accomplished. For example, the idea to create a National Security Council passed in a different form in December 2013; recommendations from the expert commission Abe assembled to examine the legal basis for national security, especially the issue of CSD, were adopted by cabinet decision in July 2014 and a package of legislation in September 2015; and implementation of policies based on the US-Japan joint security declaration of 2006 were enacted in new US-Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation in April 2015. In this sense, Abe’s first term in office can be seen as setting the agenda for what would become Japan’s security renaissance, building on an agenda set under Koizumi.
Abe also sought in this first term to respond to new security challenges posed by Japan’s changed regional environment and also to affronts to the historical memories of World War II perceived by his right-wing supporters. Here he was constrained by the strong postwar antimilitarist legacy and also made little headway in changing the narrative in historical memories of World War II. Abe did manage to continue the modest level of Japan’s increased global presence enacted under Koizumi and put Japan-China relations on a better track, which was further cemented by his successor, Fukuda. During Abe’s reign, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao visited Tokyo and spoke to the Diet in a way that explicitly minimized Japan’s wartime atrocities vis-à-vis China and focused on the future in a way that foreshadowed how Abe’s approach to discussing Japan’s history would emerge when he returned to become prime minister in 2012 (and which the Chinese at that time would harshly criticize).
However, Abe showed insufficient attention to economic policy and pursued an overly ambitious security agenda—likely the result, at least in part, of political inexperience, a lesson he learned from for his later term as prime minister. Growing public discontent over Abe’s apparent aloofness to the concerns of everyday Japanese—opponents derisively called him obotchan (a reference to a spoiled child)—led to a major election upset just ten months after Abe assumed power.
The LDP loss of the Upper House in the July 2007 election dramatically altered the prospects for Abe’s agenda. The DPJ won a stunning 50 percent of the seats contested in the election (half the seats were not up for grabs in the staggered six-year terms of the Upper House), leaving the DPJ tantalizingly close to a majority on its own but in any case holding enough seats to thwart the LDP from passing legislation without the cooperation of parties other than its standard coalition partner, the Kōmei Party. The LDP won only 30 percent of the seats. (See appendix 2 for more on the election outcome.) As a result, a new era in Japanese politics had begun: the era of the twisted Diet—for the first time in postwar Japanese history. While common in the United States, this new, divided government required significant rethinking of Abe’s political agenda.
The DPJ promptly exercised this new power in the security arena by refusing to renew JMSDF refueling support for the US-led antiterrorism coalition that had been operating from the Indian Ocean since 2001, leading to a brief suspension of a JMSDF role while new constraints on JSDF action overseas were negotiated. The DPJ’s policy cohesion, especially in the area of security policy, however, was uneven at best due to the patchwork way it became the primary opposition party.15 The DPJ was founded in 1996 from several disparate groups, including former members of the JSP and the LDP—archrivals in the previous “1955 system” discussed in chapter 2. Yukio Hatoyama, a former fourth-generation LDP politician whose grandfather had served as the first LDP prime minister, and Naoto Kan, formerly of the Democratic Social Federation, cofounded the party—and, fittingly, would become the first two DPJ prime ministers thirteen and fourteen years later, respectively, as seen in the next section. Mergers in 1998 and 2003 expanded the ranks of the DPJ. In 1998, the DPJ absorbed six small opposition parties and enlisted some former members of the splintered New Frontier Party, transforming itself into the “new” DPJ. In 2003, Ichirō Ozawa’s Liberal Party merged with the DPJ. As such, the DPJ began its history with incumbent candidates of diverse career and social backgrounds.16 By 2003, the DPJ had risen to become the primary opposition party to the LDP.
After two months of trying to advance his agenda under the new political circumstances of a twisted Diet, Abe resigned for health reasons in September 2007. He returned to backbencher status in the Lower House and passed the baton of leadership to his LDP colleague, Yasuo Fukuda.
A common pattern seen in LDP leadership turnover over the previous fifty years is a shift in policy priorities with a new prime minister. In the area of security policy, Fukuda’s orientation was more similar to other centrist and left-leaning prime ministers of the past, seeking greater regional outreach and an economics-first diplomacy along the lines of his father, former prime minister Takeo Fukuda—who, in the late 1970s, had advocated for what is now called the Fukuda Doctrine of economic development and closer diplomatic and cultural ties with Southeast Asian states. Yasuo Fukuda continued Abe’s policy of outreach to China, as noted in chapter 3—including visiting Beijing in his first three months in office and literally “playing ball” with Chinese premier Wen. Much fanfare was made of a “historic” cooperative agreement over the East China Sea—but details were scant, and in subsequent years the agreement was largely abandoned.17
At the same time, however, Fukuda was forced to try to manage the twisted Diet, which led to paralysis in multiple areas of domestic policy and also to strains in US-Japan relations. In particular, the agreed-upon plan to relocate the Futenma air station in Okinawa was stalled and the suspension of JMSDF refueling operations in the Indian Ocean because of DPJ opposition in the Upper House caused tense exchanges with Washington. More broadly, this policy gridlock led Washington to question the global role Japan had paid at least lip service to under Koizumi, with Japan’s intransigence criticized in several high-profile reports.18 Fukuda, too, would serve as prime minister for only one year, resigning amid declining popularity and concern in the party about required Lower House elections less than one year away.
Under Prime Minister Tarō Asō, public distaste for the LDP continued unabated. The global financial crisis of autumn 2008 and the winter of 2009 posed an additional serious setback for a resurgence of the LDP in the polls, as Japanese exports plummeted and Japan once again entered into recession. Asō expressed many of the foreign policy preferences of Abe, including deepened outreach to Australia and India and a values-based diplomacy concept based in a “security diamond” concept. Under Asō’s leadership, the LDP completed a draft of an ambitious plan to recraft Japan’s broader security strategy to respond to new international circumstances, a new NDPG, and also made a renewed commitment to the United States to make progress on Okinawa base realignment after Democrats came to power in the United States, with the January 2009 inauguration of US president Barack Obama. On Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s first trip abroad, to Japan, Asō assured Clinton that Japan was fully committed to moving ahead with deepening the US-Japan alliance in ways set out in the 2006 roadmap issued under Koizumi four years prior but not substantially pursued.
The Asō government did not last long enough to implement either plan, however. After multiple delays to calling elections in the Lower House because of repeated declines in LDP popularity in opinion polls, Asō was forced to call an election at the very end of the four-year term of the Lower House. A DPJ victory seemed assured—but few predicted the complete rout of the LDP that took place.
The DPJ Challenge to Japan’s Long-Standing Yet Evolving Security Practices
The DPJ’s win in the Lower House election of August 30, 2009, was historic—the first time another party gained more seats in the Lower House since the LDP was formed in 1955—and it was a landslide: the DPJ won 64 percent of the seats (with roughly 45 percent of the vote—see appendix 2). What the Lower House landslide could not change, however, was the result of the 2007 Upper House election, in which the DPJ fell just a hair shy of an outright majority on its own and thus required a coalition partner to govern both houses of the Diet after the Lower House election win. After just over a week of political wrangling, the DPJ announced a coalition with the tiny SDP and formed its historic non-LDP cabinet a week later—including Japan’s first non-LDP minister of defense in over half a century. This coalition with the SDP forced the DPJ repeatedly to compromise on security legislation in a way similar to how the LDP would later have to compromise with the Kōmei Party to pass legislation in its coalition formed after the December 2012 election.
The initial euphoria of a landslide election result and an opposition rise to power quickly turned to a fundamental challenge of DPJ governance without governing experience, however. This was exacerbated by the DPJ campaign pledge of “politician control over bureaucrats” (seiji shudō) and a lack of a formal process of political handover (since a handoff from one party to another party also had not happened in half a century). One example of many such challenges was the lack of an official system of classifying information as secret or sensitive, an issue controversially addressed by the later Abe government with the Designated State Secrets law of December 2013. At the time of the transition, numerous senior bureaucrats expressed concern over what sort of information about Japan’s security policies could be shared with the senior leadership of the DPJ-led government. The issue of the so-called secret agreements (mitsu yaku) with the United States related to the possible discretionary US introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan during the Cold War (despite Japan’s official three principles on nuclear weapons that would preclude such introduction) is one example that earned widespread media attention, and an official inquiry panel set up by the DPJ when numerous senior and retired bureaucrats and former LDP officials steadfastly refused to provide the new DPJ government with documents related to the issue.19
Still, on the positive side, the DPJ-led coalition controlled both houses of the Diet, ending for a time the period of the twisted Diet. Managing the coalition proved to be a major challenge, however, particularly cooperation with the SDP over security-related policies. The SDP is the successor to the JSP, which changed its name in 1996. At the time of the name change, many members defected to join the newly founded DPJ, partly for ideological reasons but also as a practical means of winning in the newly introduced SMD in the Lower House.20 One of the primary ideological concerns of the SDP was protecting the “peace constitution”—continuing a thread from the JSP past.21 Research into DPJ candidates shows that by the 2000 election, there were fewer former JSP members among the DPJ ranks than candidates who were former LDP or Sakigake politicians.22 However, even though the number of former JSP members had shrunk, they were disproportionately senior in the DPJ:23 although former JSP members made up less than 4 percent of DPJ Diet members after the 2009 election, roughly 10 percent of appointments to the Hatoyama cabinet went to former JSP members, rising to nearly 17 percent of appointments to the subsequent Kan cabinet.24 This led to a significant voice for Japan’s long-standing antimilitarist policies in the new DPJ government.
Weston Konishi groups DPJ members at the time into four main foreign policy schools: “realists (those who favor a strengthened defense policy and US-Japan alliance), pacifists (those who want to maintain constitutional restrictions on security policy and do away with the US-Japan alliance), centrists (those who do not have deep foreign policy convictions but who tend to lean toward the realist school by default), and neo-autonomists (those who want a strong defense policy in order to gain greater strategic independence from the United States).”25 The coalition building across these groups, and with the SDP in the early days of DPJ governance, would illustrate the next step in Japan’s security renaissance: crafting a broad consensus on Japan’s future security direction beyond the single long-ruling LDP. The senior DPJ leadership was fraught with challenges to managing the coalition and intraparty rivalries, particularly over the security divide in the DPJ and the more left views of the SDP. The DPJ experienced a change of fortune in February 2010, however, thanks to the defection of an LDP Diet member, giving the DPJ control of the Upper House without the SDP and allowing the DPJ to rule in both houses on its own. The DPJ-SDP coalition formally ended in May 2010.
In the end, the DPJ period served to further reify and even expand LDP-era security practices rather than lead Japan in a substantially new direction. This was certainly not the intention of the party, however, which assumed power on a far-reaching reform agenda that challenged and offered alternatives on a very wide range of domestic and international policies of the LDP in addition to challenging important processes by which policy was formulated and implemented.26
A substantial body of scholarship on DPJ-era foreign policy is only just emerging. The limited work that has appeared to date has focused on explaining DPJ ideas about foreign policy, including those articulated before the DPJ assumed power in September 2009, and also DPJ efforts to alter some long-standing practices in security policy.27 By contrast, this chapter seeks to draw attention to the results of DPJ-era security policy—the legacies left by the DPJ as the LDP reassumed political power in December 2012 and the broader importance of the DPJ era to Japan’s security renaissance. Already by 2009, a switch in power away from LDP to opposition was not expected to lead to the sort of change that the JSP coming to power in the Cold War period may have led to—such as dissolving the US-Japan alliance or disbanding the JSDF. Still, as framed by Konishi, major figures in the DPJ advocated a set of views that coalesced around three primary goals for change in Japan’s security practices under the LDP: (1) a more equal alliance with the United States, (2) closer ties to China and other Asian states, and (3) a more proactive diplomacy in conjunction with the United Nations, including UNPKO.28 The importance of the changed international security environment—particularly Japan’s new position vis-à-vis China—was signaled early by the Hatoyama administration’s early outreach to China, the sharp escalation of tensions with China over the Senkaku Fishing Trawler Incident of the fall of 2010 under Kan, and the resulting severe tensions over the Senkaku “nationalization” in the summer and fall of 2012 under Noda. At the same time, the long legacies of Japan’s struggles to come to terms with the legacy of World War II and the colonialist period, its postwar antimilitarist past, and inequality in the US alliance were also strongly evident in these three years of DPJ governance.
Hatoyama’s Challenge to the US-Japan Alliance Legacy
As the DPJ’s first prime minister, Hatoyama entered office with a range of expectations that would have been impossible for anyone to fully satisfy because of both the incompatible campaign promises and the strong expectation among many voters that the DPJ would act in stark contrast to previous LDP governments. In the area of foreign policy, Hatoyama was known to be a leading proponent of a more assertive and autonomous Japanese diplomacy that sought to hedge against a growing expectation of US decline.29 Another difficulty of the early Hatoyama period was the awkward “dual power structure” between Hatoyama and fellow DPJ leader Ichirō Ozawa.30 Ozawa likely would have served as the first DPJ prime minister had he not been embroiled in a campaign finance scandal that led him to resign as president of the DPJ just months before the party rose to power.31
Hatoyama posed numerous early challenges to the US-Japan alliance legacy. He refused to commit at the time he assumed office to LDP-era agreements to implement US base relocation in Okinawa, saying he needed to review the facts on the ground. To this, explains Christopher Hughes, Hatoyama faced “a near brick wall of US resistance to certain aspects of its attempts to rearticulate the basis of the bilateral alliance.”32 In addition, as with Abe before him, Hatoyama chose to meet with Chinese president Hu Jintao before meeting with US president Barack Obama (whom he met first on the sidelines of the opening of the United Nations in New York in September and then again during Obama’s visit to Japan in November). Moreover, the Hatoyama government alienated bureaucrats in Japan and the United States through its awkward outreach due to a lack of personal connections in the bureaucracy and among senior political leadership abroad and, more broadly, to the DPJ policy of seiji shudō, stressed in its campaign manifesto for the purpose of centralizing decision making in the cabinet and prime minister’s office rather than in conjunction with senior bureaucrats. Information released through WikiLeaks shows that Japan’s powerful bureaucrats sought to maintain strong US-Japan ties in the early days of the DPJ government when the DPJ leadership was seeking to exert stronger control over the bureaucracy, a central aspect of the DPJ election platform.33
Hatoyama’s stated goal of “equidistance” with China also did not go as planned. Despite the fanfare of the Ozawa-led DPJ Diet member visit to Beijing to meet President Hu in December 2010—where Hu reportedly shook hands with six hundred DPJ Diet members and staff—China’s more assertive behavior both in the economic sphere in response to the global financial crisis and in the military sphere in terms of military spending and the East and South China Seas pushed the DPJ and Japan to move on earlier LDP-era plans to develop a closer military relationship with the United States. Plans for announcing concrete measures toward a deeper US-Japan alliance at the sixtieth anniversary celebrations of the alliance in January 2010 were thwarted, however, by the tensions between the Hatoyama government and the United States generated by disagreements over Okinawa and Hatoyama’s own rhetoric and management style.
Japan under Hatoyama did continue from the outset, however, the recent LDP governments’ policy of seeking opportunities to diversify Japan’s strategic partners beyond the United States—which resonated with the neo-autonomous ambitions of some DPJ members such as Hatoyama and Ozawa. This policy would later be reified as a core aspect of Japan’s first formal national security strategy issued in 2013 under Abe. At a summit meeting in New Delhi, Prime Minister Hatoyama and Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh agreed to enhance security cooperation between the two countries. Japan also signed an ACSA with Australia for peacetime security cooperation—the first such agreement Japan has signed with a country other than the United States.34 The DPJ also continued to work toward a greater contribution to UNPKO and legislation to enable that—building on the legacy of DPJ senior member Ichirō Ozawa’s long push for Japan to make an expanded security contribution in this area (which dated back to his influential call for Japan to become a “normal nation” in his 1994 best-selling book).35
Despite the many shortcomings and the tensions apparent in the period of Hatoyama governance, his administration does go down in history for its ultimate embrace of the US-Japan security relationship—a fundamental turning point for Japan’s former opposition party stance. The January 2010 Clinton-Okada joint statement on the fiftieth anniversary of the security treaty was not the gala celebration many had imagined just a year earlier, but it did mark the occasion with promises of further alliance deepening. The first MOD annual white paper to be issued under the DPJ government explicitly noted the significance of the first DPJ defense minister’s issuing the white paper, with Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa giving in its introduction his personal view that a DPJ minister issuing the white paper “will give it an even greater significance than [in] ordinary years.” This first DPJ defense white paper essentially continues the same themes as the introduction to the previous volume under LDP rule, noting that “the security environment surrounding Japan is growing increasingly severe” and stressing the importance of Japan’s making an international contribution to security given that “Japan relies on foreign countries for most of its resources and food.” Further, his introduction promises a new NDPG within the year and that “the Ministry of Defense and the SDF continue to evolve on a day-to-day basis while expanding the range of activities further.”36
In looking back on the nine months of rule of the first DPJ prime minister, who represented a party voted to power in a landslide, it is clear that multiple, overlapping factors contributed to Hatoyama’s, and his party’s, inability to implement policies that substantially changed the direction of security policy of the previous LDP governments. Domestic policy and political and institutional issues factored highly in their failures, but the three historical legacies evident for decades of LDP rule—the antimilitarist legacy, the US-Japan alliance legacy, and the unresolved wartime history legacy—as well as the shifting international environment, clearly impacted Hatoyama’s agenda and shaped what successes he had.
A New Security Posture and Alliance Deepening Under Kan
Naoto Kan, the second DPJ prime minister, did not face the same expectations for change as his predecessor, after the public had experienced ten months of rocky DPJ governance and had been exposed somewhat to the difficulties of transformational governance reform. Despite the end of the twisted Diet in May 2010, the DPJ ability to pass legislation in its first Diet session in power was extremely low.37 As a result, the DPJ scaled back some of the institutional reforms implemented early in the Hatoyama period. Of particular relevance to security policy coordination, the DPJ sought to reincorporate the bureaucracy into the policymaking process. It was too little, too late, however: voters shifted support to the LDP and other parties in the July 2010 Upper House election held just a month after Kan took office.
The LDP secured 42 percent of the seats contested in the July 2010 Upper House election, the largest percentage of any party in that election. The DPJ won only 36 percent of the open seats, though they retained their share of the half of the seats from the 2007 election that were not up for grabs in 2010. (See appendix 2 for voting and seat percentages won by other parties.) Less than two months after the DPJ’s pummeling in the Upper House election, however, the party benefited from a rally ’round the flag effect related to the first Senkaku crisis, the Fishing Trawler Incident, in September 2010. Despite the apparently poor handling of the incident by the DPJ, the perception of Chinese overreaction to Japanese policy had the effect of boosting Kan’s popularity. In addition, Kan had just emerged victorious in a leadership battle in the DPJ presidential election (on September 10), where once again Ichirō Ozawa was pushed aside as the possible next DPJ prime minister.
Some internal DPJ efforts to alter the long-standing course of Japanese security policy were further thwarted by the return to a twisted Diet for only a second time in Japanese history (and a second time in two years). This required greater cooperation with the LDP in order to pass legislation and afforded an excuse for Kan to reach out to the LDP over security issues, leading to resumed discussion of the DPJ’s implementing the new NDPG draft completed under Asō in 2009 but not able to be enacted by the LDP before its loss of power.
The September 2010 Senkaku Fishing Trawler Incident further pushed Kan and the DPJ to consider security policy initiatives developed in the waning years of LDP rule. The China threat hit home, leading to changed public opinion related to China and security and stressing among the public the importance of the US-Japan alliance, in particular Article Five of the security treaty, which promises US protection of all territory administered by Japan. The DPJ under Kan also continued outreach to new security partners. For example, Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara’s first overseas bilateral meeting with Australia in November 2010 accelerated discussion of an advanced information-sharing agreement to facilitate increased defense cooperation with that nation.
The December 2010 NDPG emerged from over a year of DPJ internal discussion and debate over Japan’s proper security course, which had resulted in the expulsion of the pacifist-leaning SDP from the ruling coalition and, in addition, the abrupt resignation of Prime Minister Hatoyama. In this new NDPG, which is widely reported to be quite similar to the draft prepared by the LDP in 2009, Japanese defense policy made substantial progress toward goals originally articulated in the Koizumi period that arose from multiple discussions with US alliance counterparts and in subsequent internal discussions in Japan’s own defense establishment (particularly in the MOD and the Cabinet Office). On the one hand, some long-standing themes in DPJ statements about its preferred Japanese security outlook were articulated in the new NDPG, such as increased indigenous defense capabilities and enhanced capabilities that could contribute to sea-lane defense and to UNPKO. Deeper outreach to new security partners in the region such as Australia, India, and South Korea—policies initiated under previous LDP rule but also long supported in DPJ statements while in opposition—was also enhanced in this important DPJ security document. On the other hand, increased rhetoric suggesting the need to militarily confront China and to deepen the US-Japan alliance in ways that set aside earlier rhetoric of “equality” marks a significant change in DPJ policy when compared with the Hatoyama government.
The 2010 NDPG formally abandoned the “basic defense force” concept introduced in the 1978 NDPO in favor of a “dynamic defense” force concept. Similarly, “dynamic deterrence” was planned through an increase in operational activity such as ISR. This document shows conceptual linkages to US goals to respond to China’s growing capabilities, such as the air-sea battle concept—clearly due to close coordination between Japanese and US defense planners. The document also introduced the idea of gray-zone disputes, defined as confrontations over territory, sovereignty, and economic interest that do not escalate into wars—as discussed in earlier chapters of this book.
Under the new NDPG, the JMSDF was set to expand its submarine fleet from sixteen to twenty-two boats, upgrade to the Hyūga-class destroyer, and upgrade P-1 long-range patrol aircraft. Japan’s amphibious warfare capabilities were also strengthened, including a dedicated unit in the JGSDF that has been training with the US Marines in annual exercises at Camp Pendleton in California since 2013 and before that in Guam and on remote Japanese islands in the southwestern island chain.
Less than three months after the adoption of the new NDPG in December 2010, another major event would challenge the DPJ in its crisis-management skills and further nudge the Japanese public and political elites toward greater support for the JSDF and the US-Japan alliance: the triple disaster of March 11, 2011. The momentous logistical challenges of disaster-relief activities in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami starkly illustrated the benefit of advance planning for contingencies in the alliance framework and the value of interoperability of US and Japanese military forces. “Operation Tomodachi” (“friendship” in Japanese) mobilized an estimated twenty-four thousand US military personnel, twenty-four US naval ships, and nearly two hundred US aircraft that all worked with the largest deployment of the JSDF in its history—over a hundred thousand troops. Extensive news coverage of these joint efforts—and their success in rescuing many Japanese victims of the disaster and rebuilding vital infrastructure—pushed public support for JSDF and the US-Japan alliance to all-time highs.38
Support for the DPJ government, however, was another matter. As with the Hatoyama experience, public support for the DPJ under Kan experienced a steady decline from initial enthusiasm when he took over the reins from deeply unpopular Hatoyama to only 20 percent support by January 2011.39 The triple disaster further weakened the DPJ, and while Kan survived a no-confidence vote in the Diet in July 2011, he resigned soon after.
Looking back on the fifteen months of the second DPJ government, one begins to see how resilient Japan’s long-standing security practices had become—despite multiple stresses and changes in power. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, one begins to see the mechanisms by which they are reinforced for new circumstances. These trends would continue under the final DPJ prime minister of this period, Yoshihiko Noda.
Noda’s “Normalcy” and the Fall of the DPJ from Power
In sharp contrast to Hatoyama, Yoshihiko Noda came from the conservative wing of the DPJ. That his father was a former JSDF officer caused some on the left in his party to treat him with suspicion, and others in the LDP and bureaucracy to offer him the benefit of the doubt. Noda benefited from an early boost of support—over 50 percent in Asahi polls and more than 70 percent in Yomiuri polls40—but as with the previous five prime ministers, there was a quick decline exacerbated by the policy gridlock of the twisted Diet, leading to early elections in December 2012 (instead of as late as August 2013 allowed under the four-year-maximum terms of the Lower House). By what would be the final year of DPJ rule, Sneider argues, “The Noda administration, in the view of critics within the DPJ itself, had in many respects brought Japanese foreign policy back to the positions of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party–led governments that preceded—and succeeded—its coming to power.”41
In his fifteen months in office, Noda helped to develop the US-Japan alliance relationship to LDP-era closeness, building on the post–March 11 bump in popularity among the general public, initially seen in the last months of the Kan government. DPJ policy regarding controlling bureaucrats was further scaled back, also building on Kan government policies and leading to more effective security planning and US-Japan alliance deepening. Still, numerous crises continued under DPJ rule—both domestic and international—and tensions continued to mount on a number of fronts.
On one front, tensions grew during the summer and fall of 2012 over the so-called nationalization of three of the Senkaku Islands by the Noda government—which China derided as a disruptive change in the status quo and the Noda government explained as an effort to maintain the status quo. Japanese nationalist agitators instigated by then Tokyo governor Shintarō Ishihara sought to purchase the privately owned islands for the purpose of further asserting Japanese sovereignty (such as by erecting structures or offering tours), which Noda sought to avert by arranging for the islands to be purchased by the central government. This action sparked a return of anti-Japanese rioting in several Chinese cities and widespread damage to Japanese-owned factories and businesses in China—similar to the large-scale riots seen in the Koizumi period and to a lesser extent after the Fishing Trawler Incident of 2010. It also led to a new status quo related to Chinese activities around the Senkaku Islands, sparking a new era of regular Chinese entry into the territorial waters of the islands and occasional overflights of their airspace. This new status quo continues and is closely monitored by the JSDF and JCG—and is used as one of the major justifications for the further shift of JSDF resources to the southwest (closer to the islands), as seen in the next steps of Japan’s changed defense posture discussed in chapter 5.
On another front, tensions with South Korea over history issues continued from the previous Kan administration. Kan’s August 2010 statement of remorse on the occasion marking Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula one hundred years ago had only sparked further calls for apologies and compensation, contrary to what many in the DPJ had expected by this new apology statement and also related gestures such as the return of some Korean cultural treasures that had been taken to Japan during the colonial period. In August 2011 the Korean Constitutional Court ruled that the previous Korean government’s failure to negotiate on the comfort women issue was unconstitutional—reopening the reparations issue from World War II that Japan firmly asserts was settled in the 1965 agreement to normalize relations between Japan and South Korea. The following August, South Korean president Lee Myung-bak visited Takeshima (the disputed islet between Japan and South Korea that South Korea controls), a first for a Korean president, further disrupting the status quo over history issues. In the midst of these two milestone incidents, Korean (and Chinese) criticism of Japanese textbook portrayals of Japan’s wartime conduct continued at a high rate.
Noda struggled to sustain diplomatic engagement with China and South Korea through both bilateral and formal trilateral dialogue that had managed to continue through the tensions and leadership transitions among the three states since the beginning of the period examined in this chapter, transitions that also included the destabilizing rise to power of the third-generation Kim Jong Un in North Korea.
In the midst of these tensions, public support for the DPJ was waning. It appeared that the public was fed up with too many crises and missteps. In July 2012, Ozawa and forty-eight of his supporters defected from the DPJ in opposition to the Noda government’s plan to increase the consumption tax and formed the People’s Life Party, which later merged with other parties to become the Tomorrow Party of Japan.42 As the deadline for the next Lower House election neared in the minds of the DPJ leadership, the LDP emerged newly resurgent under Shinzō Abe after a contentious election for the LDP presidency in September 2012. With LDP leadership renewed, there was a strong LDP push for an early election, leading to a brokered deal for a December 2012 election as a DPJ compromise to push through legislation in the twisted Diet.
Noda dissolved the Lower House on November 16, 2012—prompting additional defections from the DPJ. By the time of the December 16, 2012, election, three new parties had been formed: Your Party (YP), the Japan Restoration Party (JRP), and the Tomorrow Party. The LDP won big (294 seats of 480), and the DPJ was decimated, winning just 57 seats.43 As Sneider has summed up this final stage, “Undoubtedly, driven in large part by the actions of the Chinese government and to some extent by events on the Korean peninsula and elsewhere in the region, the DPJ went through a return to greater realism, whether reluctantly, as some have suggested, or even resentfully. Still, the DPJ represented a significant development in the evolution of postwar Japanese foreign and security-policy thought.”44
How can we explain the shift in DPJ policy to the right? And why the changed parameters for security policy enacted under Noda? As discussed in chapter 3, over the course of the six years discussed in this chapter, Japan’s international environment continued to shift dramatically. The rise to power of the Democrats in Japan coincided with a rise of Democrats in the United States. Moreover, the US rebalance and reengagement with Asia gave new impetus to Japan’s strategy of deeper engagement with the region—including militarily. In addition, China’s increased assertiveness related to the Senkaku Islands, the South China Sea, and greater military capabilities overall, together with continued North Korean provocations and capability increases, pushed the DPJ to respond with new security policies. Sneider has argued that this significant development was “an attempt, however limited, to shift the paradigm away from the doctrine of total dependence and subordination to American strategic policy”45—but an alternative argument, looking back on the DPJ period, is that the more significant development of this period was that of a consensus among the major ruling and opposition parties (in particular the LDP, DPJ, and Kōmei) about the core direction of Japanese security policy for the twenty-first century: continuing in its mooring in antimilitarist practices and the US-Japan alliance while seeking to play a limited but expanded international role within the confines imposed by Japan’s incomplete reconciling with the legacies of its militarist era.
In an early look back at the DPJ ruling period, Sneider writes, “The DPJ indeed ‘learned’ some powerful lessons about the obstacles to trying to shift Japanese foreign policy away, even slightly, from the well-established moorings of the established order.”46 “But,” he continues, “it would be mistaken to assume that the core beliefs of the DPJ and the profound shift in Japanese policy that they imply have simply faded from the scene.”47 Indeed, contending schools of thought in Japan about the proper course of Japanese security policy have been evident throughout the postwar period. As discussed in the next chapter, the rise of the once antimainstream conservative faction in the LDP now led by Prime Minister Abe is a significant development in Japanese domestic politics with a deep influence on future Japanese security policy, but certainly it does not symbolize a new unanimity of beliefs in Japan related to military security of that ideological bent.
One finding from an examination of the three-year experience of DPJ rule, however, is that domestic political factors play a substantial role in how political coalitions form over security policy, independent of evolving public opinion over security issues and of changes in the regional security environment. Scholarly analysis demonstrates how these three factors—domestic politics and institutions, public opinion, and changes in the regional security environment—in fact interact deeply and thus cannot be fully examined independently.48 Still, a first-order analysis can be conducted as if these three factors were independent variables, and it shows clearly that turbulently shifting domestic politics in the period 2006 to 2012 played an important role in how Japan’s security policies evolved toward maintained continuity, rather than the discontinuity sought by some in the DPJ, leading to the further institutionalization of Japan’s security renaissance in the six-year period “from Abe to Abe.”
Conclusion: The Institutionalization of Japan’s Security Renaissance from 2006 to 2012
Japanese politics appeared to have ushered in the new century with a newfound stability under the five-year reign of popular prime minister Jun’ichirō Koizumi from 2001 to 2006. After Koizumi, however, Japan returned to its 1990s experience of frequent turnover of political leadership and, as in the interlude of 1993 to 1994, a brief fall of the long-ruling LDP from power. Despite seven different prime ministers in as many years—spanning a range of positions on the left-right spectrum—Japan’s security policies developed over this period toward increased capabilities, expanded roles within the US-Japan alliance, and greater international engagement. Changes in the international environment occurred together with—and contributed to—Japan’s long-stagnating domestic economy and worsening budgetary and fiscal woes, prompting voters to pursue new political approaches to both domestic and international challenges, further institutionalizing Japan’s security renaissance.
Looking back at the brief three-year DPJ period, it is clear that not only did the DPJ not fundamentally alter Japanese security policy but, conversely, acted to reify long-standing policies enacted under over half a century of LDP rule. This finding differs from the picture of DPJ rule painted by informed analysts at the time of DPJ rule. For example, Christopher Hughes has written, “[the DPJ] has also initiated, whether deliberately or inadvertently, a process of longer-term shift, and drift, in Japan’s strategy. The DPJ is now thought to be diverting Japan from the trajectory laid down by the LDP—a trajectory that in recent years, and especially under the premiership of Koizumi Jun’ichiro, has generally been viewed as setting a benchmark to be emulated of close US-Japan alliance ties and concomitant Japanese international proactivity.”49
While the DPJ currently is a mere shadow of its former self and is trying to reinvigorate the party under new leadership after the 2016 Upper House election, the underlying views that DPJ leaders expressed related to the three postwar historical legacies remain salient. The international environment Japan faces continues to evolve at the rapid pace seen since the beginning of DPJ rule in 2009; the leadership of the DPJ is also changing from DPJ founders such as Hatoyama, Kan, and Ozawa to a new generation whose foreign policy views have been shaped in part by the more recent international environment Japan faces.
Four major effects on Japan’s security practices can be seen in the period “from Abe to Abe.” First, there was a much wider public discussion of appropriate security practices to address Japan’s shifting international environment. The period started with widespread expectation of further “normalization” continuing from the Koizumi period. The stresses on the political system of that period were underappreciated, however, leading to a wider public discussion of Japan’s appropriate security roles in the new century and a pause in further moves down the path that Koizumi had laid. Moreover, there was growing public perception that other important issues were being neglected: economic growth, the dismal fiscal position, and even basic competency issues in governance (like losing millions of pension records and repeated scandals involving cabinet members). Fifty years of LDP rule had created the impression of an ossified and out-of-touch party.
Second, new strategic thinking was implemented in this period to move away from the Cold War–era defense posture and to respond comprehensively to the primary challenge of China’s rise and more broadly to the dramatically changed regional and international environment. In particular, the 2010 NDPG set out a comprehensive strategy for implementing this new thinking, demonstrating remarkable continuity from the LDP to DPJ (and, as discussed in chapter 5, with the new LDP government in the second Abe administration). The strategic posture shift away from the Soviet threat in the north to the China threat in the southwest, enhanced military capabilities, and expanded cooperation with the United States and with other security partners were all important new legacies from this period.
Third, despite periods of tension, the US-Japan alliance was reaffirmed and revitalized in the years 2006 to 2012. The relationship stood ready for next steps of alliance deepening under revised US-Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation negotiated by the second Abe administration in the next period (examined in chapter 5). The March 2011 triple disaster and Operation Tomodachi response played an important role in deepening public support for the alliance, as did US support for Japan related to Japan’s escalating confrontations with China.
A fourth legacy of this period is the increased international security activities Japan engaged in beyond the US-Japan alliance: the new strategic partnership with Australia, enhanced security cooperation with South Korea, deeper engagement with regional security institutions, and increased out-of-area activities (in particular anti-piracy efforts of both the JCG and the JMSDF).
A number of important and far-reaching changes to Japan’s security practices have been implemented in the years since 2006, but these changes do not mark a fundamental shift in the principles that guide Japanese security policy. Given the scale of change in Japanese identity in this period as defined in relational terms, such as vis-à-vis China or South Korea,50 one might expect greater policy change in this period than actually seen. Challenges posed to the historical legacy of antimilitarism by the first Abe administration in 2006 to 2007, for example, were substantial but not realized in actual policy outcomes. Similarly, challenges posed to the historical legacy of the US-Japan alliance by the Hatoyama administration in 2009 to 2010 were also substantial, and also ultimately unsuccessful in altering the direction of change in Japanese security policy related to US-Japan alliance deepening. Altering the long-standing historical legacy of lack of historical reconciliation over World War II and events prior also proved difficult to achieve, despite concerted efforts by successive prime ministers in this period.
This chapter has sought to highlight the new domestic political dynamic that emerged in the tumultuous period 2006 to 2012 and its broad effect on Japanese security policies and practices. The renaissance in security practice and discussions of security practice that took place in this period laid the foundation for further change implemented by the second Abe administration beginning in December 2012.