Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security: From Pacifism to Realism?

By Paul Midford

In this book, Paul Midford engages claims that since 9/11 Japanese public opinion has turned sharply away from pacifism and toward supporting normalization of Japan's military power, in which Japanese troops would fight alongside their American counterparts in various conflicts worldwide.

Midford argues that Japanese public opinion has never embraced pacifism. It has, instead, contained significant elements of realism, in that it has acknowledged the utility of military power for defending national territory and independence, but has seen offensive military power as ineffective for promoting other goals—such as suppressing terrorist networks and WMD proliferation, or promoting democracy overseas.

Over several decades, these realist attitudes have become more evident as the Japanese state has gradually convinced its public that Tokyo and its military can be trusted with territorial defense, and even with noncombat humanitarian and reconstruction missions overseas. On this basis, says Midford, we should re-conceptualize Japanese public opinion as attitudinal defensive realism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9780804777711

Book preview

Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security

SERIES EDITORS

Muthiah Alagappa

East-West Center

Randall Schweller

Ohio State University

INTERNATIONAL BOARD

Wu Xinbo

Fudan University

Studies in Asian Security

A SERIES SPONSORED BY THE EAST-WEST CENTER

Muthiah Alagappa, Chief Editor

Distinguished Senior Fellow, East-West Center

The Studies in Asian Security book series promotes analysis, understanding, and explanation of the dynamics of domestic, transnational, and international security challenges in Asia. The peer-reviewed publications in the Series analyze contemporary security issues and problems to clarify debates in the scholarly community, provide new insights and perspectives, and identify new research and policy directions. Security is defined broadly to include the traditional political and military dimensions as well as nontraditional dimensions that affect the survival and well being of political communities. Asia, too, is defined broadly to include Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia.

Designed to encourage original and rigorous scholarship, books in the Studies in Asian Security series seek to engage scholars, educators, and practitioners. Wide-ranging in scope and method, the Series is receptive to all paradigms, programs, and traditions, and to an extensive array of methodologies now employed in the social sciences.

* * *

The East-West Center promotes better relations and understanding among the people and nations of the United States, Asia, and the Pacific through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. Established by the U.S. Congress in 1960, the Center serves as a resource for information and analysis on critical issues of common concern, bringing people together to exchange views, build expertise, and develop policy options. The Center is an independent, public, nonprofit organization with funding from the U.S. government, and additional support provided by private agencies, individuals, foundations, corporations, and governments in the region.

Rethinking Japanese

Public Opinion and Security

FROM PACIFISM TO REALISM?

Paul Midford

SPONSORED BY THE EAST-WEST CENTER

Stanford University Press • Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Midford, Paul.

   Rethinking Japanese public opinion and security: from pacifism to realism?/Paul Midford.

      p. cm. — (Studies in Asian security)

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-8047-7216-7 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-7217-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

   1. National security—Japan—Public opinion. 2. Japan—Military policy—Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—Japan. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in Asian security.

UA845.M455 2011

355′.033052—dc22

2010029234

Typeset by Thompson Type in 10.5/13.5 Bembo

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-7771-1

To the memory of my father,

Dr. Thomas Arthur Midford

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

List of Abbreviations

A Note on Japanese Transliteration and Names

1   Introduction

2   Public Attitudes, Opinion, and the Conditions for Policy Influence

3   Views on the Utility of Military Force and America’s Use of Force

4   Reassessing Public Opinion during the Cold War

5   The First Gulf War

6   International Peacekeeping and the U.S. Alliance in the 1990s

7   Japanese Public Opinion and Responses to 9–11 and the Afghan Invasion

8   The Iraq War and the SDF

9   Reversing Course: An Iraq Syndrome in Japan

10   Conclusions

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figures

Tables

Preface

During an early morning panel on Japanese foreign policy at the 2003 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in New York City, I was struck by several claims made there that Japanese public opinion was becoming hawkish on security, even to the point of getting out in front of the conservative ruling LDP, then led by hawkish Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō. These claims provoked me to wonder whether they were true. I started looking for answers, and soon I realized three things. First, I discovered an embarrassment of riches in polling data, especially Japanese-language data. Second, I found that, although it is common for academic works on Japanese foreign policy to cite a poll result or two here and there, there was exceptionally little scholarly research, even in Japanese and especially in English, on Japanese public opinion and its influence on security policy. Finally, I saw that Koizumi’s bold plans, and the equally bold predictions of pundits, for the Japanese military to begin playing a significant (read combat) role in international security were going largely unfulfilled.

Fortuitously, several months after the meeting I received an invitation from friend and colleague Robert Eldridge to join a project he was organizing on Japanese public opinion and the war on terrorism. He had received a Humanities and Social Science Grant (Jinbun Shakai Kagaku Joseikin) from the Suntory Foundation and was assembling a group of expat American scholars (plus a Japanese scholar) based in Japan to examine this topic. Robert and I eventually published the results of this project in our coedited volume with Palgrave Macmillan in 2008: Japanese Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism. I would like to thank Palgrave for allowing me to include over a dozen pages from my contributions to this volume in Chapter 2 of this book. I owe Robert a big debt of gratitude, not just for arranging our funding but for being an inspiration, an outstanding colleague, and a good friend.

I would also like to thank the Japan Data Archive at the Roper Center, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, for providing me access and assistance during my visit (funded by the Suntory Foundation) to the Archive in March 2004. I would especially like to thank Roper Center associate director Lois Timms-Ferrara and archivist Cynthia Teixeira for extending a warm welcome and much assistance.

Another important step along the way toward completing this book was a short monograph I published with the East-West Center in Washington’s Policy Studies series in late 2006 entitled Japanese Public Opinion and the War on Terrorism: Implications for Japan’s Security Strategy. I am grateful to Dr. Muthiah Alagappa for the insightful comments and encouragement he provided during that project, as well as during the initial review of this manuscript by him and by the rest of the editorial board of the Asian Security Series at Stanford University Press. I would also like to thank Jeremy Sutherland for his able editorial assistance.

While working on both these volumes I was invited by Wilhelm Vosse of the International Christian University (ICU) of Japan and Andrew Appleton of Washington State University to participate in a seminar in Honolulu in early summer 2006 focusing on how Japanese public opinion responds to threats and globalization by using the data from their innovative joint research, the Survey on Attitudes and Global Engagement (SAGE). I learned a lot from this seminar and the exceptionally valuable SAGE data (which are analyzed in Chapter 3), and in the years since I have benefited from Wilhelm’s insightful comments, collaboration on related projects, and friendship.

In summer 2007 I received a short-term research fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), allowing me to be a visiting scholar from June to August 2007 at Osaka University’s School for International Public Policy (OSIPP). During that time I was able to complete the first draft of this manuscript. I am very grateful to JSPS for this funding and also to Professor Kurusu Kaoru for serving as my academic sponsor and for all the kind assistance and advice she provided. In summer 2008 I received a grant from the Sasakawa Scandinavian Foundation to fund a visiting research position at the Japanese Institute for International Affairs (JIIA). Although my main research during this period was for a forthcoming book on Japan’s leadership in promoting East Asian security multilateralism, this grant and my time in residence at JIIA nonetheless afforded me an opportunity to clean up some final loose ends in my research for this book. For this, as well as for support of my other project, I am grateful to both the Sasakawa Scandinavian Foundation and JIIA, especially then JIIA President Satō; Yukio.

There are two other individuals to whom I owe especially big intellectual debts. The first is someone I never met, the late Dr. Douglas H. Mendel Jr., a former U.S. military officer fluent in Japanese, who during the U.S. occupation helped conduct the first scientific opinion survey in Japan. Later he completed a doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan on Japanese public opinion and foreign policy, which in turn became the basis for his 1961 work, The Japanese People and Foreign Policy, the first and only full-length academic study published in English about public opinion as a causal factor influencing Japanese foreign policy before this book. Following his pioneering book, Mendel continued to be a prolific scholar on Japanese public opinion and foreign policy (and several related topics) until his early passing at the age of 57 in 1978. In the years that followed, no one took up Mendel’s research agenda until the first decade of this century when there was a revival of interest in Japanese public opinion.

I also owe a big intellectual debt to Robert Y. Shapiro, a professor of political science at Columbia University and a leading expert on American public opinion. Bob generously agreed to sponsor a research project for me in the mid-1990s focusing on a comparison of public opinion in Japan and the United States while I was at Columbia. In the process he introduced me to the literature, theories, debates, and methods of American public opinion scholarship, and he has continued to offer valuable insights since then. The study I wrote then subsequently influenced many of the approaches I take in this book and formed the early basis for Chapters 5 and 6.

I owe an exceptionally large debt of gratitude to Noguchi Kazuhiko, one of Japan’s best up-and-coming scholars of international politics, whom I first met in the late Sakanaka Tomohisa’s seminar on security studies at Aoyama Gakuin University in the early 1990s, for generously double-checking the transliterations of every Japanese word in this manuscript and offering valuable substantive comments along the way. I would like to thank Wada Shuichi, my oldest friend in Japan, for much of my early education on Japanese politics and more recently for organizing a revival of our G-13 benkyōkai in early summer 2007, where I presented several early chapters of this book, and for the insightful comments he gave me then. I also very much appreciate the comments my long-standing Columbia friend, Toya Minae, offered me at that meeting.

I would like to thank Andrew Oros for the useful comments he offered during a panel at the 2004 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), where I presented the earliest draft of this book’s main argument. I am indebted to Izumikawa Yasuhiro for valuable discussion and inspiration regarding the links between public opinion during the Cold War and some aspects of realism. I would like to thank Ola Listhaug, my senior colleague at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU) for the support and encouragement he offered me for this project and for carrying out my responsibilities for running the NTNU Japan Program.

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their extremely valuable comments, which helped me greatly improve this book. I would like to thank Geoffrey R. H. Burn, Director and Editor of Security Studies; Jessica Walsh and Carolyn Brown of Stanford University Press for crucial assistance in making publication of this book possible; and Margaret Pinette for copyediting. I would like to thank Routledge Press for allowing me to use seven pages in Chapter 9 from a chapter I published in Marie Soderberg and Patricia A. Nelson, eds., Japan’s Politics and Economics: Perspectives on Change. Finally, I would like to thank countless others who helped me in various ways during this project. Of course, any errors contained in this book are solely my responsibility.

Finally, I am forever indebted to my father, Dr. Thomas Arthur Midford, a 1961 Stanford PhD in physics, for instilling in me a respect and love of research and science, and for so much more. The only regret I have about this work is that it comes six years too late for my father to see. It is to his memory that I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

A note on Japanese Transliteration and Names

Regarding the transliteration of Japanese words and names, I have followed the Hepburn Romanization standard for transliterating Japanese words and use macrons for long vowels (that is, ō for denoting ou and ū for denoting uu). However, I have made exceptions when citing English-language sources that do not use macrons or spell out long vowels. Thus, when citing the Japanese press agency Kyōdō Tsūshin from a Japanese language source I use macrons, but when citing this press agency from an English source, such as the Japan Times, I follow the original rendering from that source (Kyodo Tsushin, or more commonly just Kyodo). I have generally written surname followed by given name for Japanese people, as per Japanese convention. However, I make an exception for Japanese (mostly scholars) who publish in English. Thus, I write Yasuhiro Izumikawa instead of Izumikawa Yasuhiro when discussing his works written under the former name. I also put the surname after the given name when citing Japanese books and articles in endnotes.

Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security

1

Introduction

Defense of Japan versus Overseas Force Projection

While Japan has long demonstrated a commitment to militarily defending national territory, its refusal to become a military power that uses physical coercion overseas for foreign policy objectives has been a hallmark of Japan’s postwar military posture of defensive defense (or senshu bōei).¹ Indeed, Japan’s first formally announced postwar foreign policy doctrine, the Fukuda Doctrine of 1977, which became the primary pillar of its deep economic and political engagement with the rest of East Asia, is first and foremost a promise not to become a military power capable of projecting force overseas.² However, Japan’s strong support for the George W. Bush administration’s war on terrorism and its willingness to support this war by deploying naval (and briefly air) forces to the Indian Ocean and ground, air, and naval assets to Iraq and surrounding countries for several years has raised questions about whether Tokyo is abandoning its postwar defensive defense posture and becoming a normal great power, willing to use military force overseas for foreign policy objectives.

Noting that many Japan watchers—not only foreign, but also domestic— were taken aback at both the speed and the substance³ of Japan’s reaction to the war on terrorism, Christopher Hughes suggests Japan’s participation in the Afghan campaign and Iraqi reconstruction has set vital precedents for JSDF [Japanese Self Defense Forces] dispatch that could presage Japan being drawn in radical new directions.⁴ More boldly, other observers claim Tokyo has already crossed its security Rubicon⁵ or believe that Japan is emerging as the Britain of Asia, an ally willing to fight alongside U.S. forces just as Britain does.⁶ Richard Samuels argues that the Japan of old is transforming itself into an increasingly muscular nation, one less hesitant to use force.⁷ Still others suggest that Japanese public opinion is becoming increasingly nationalistic and that this is driving the country to play a more active military role overseas.⁸

Even before the war on terrorism, scholars were starting to note a shift toward realism in Japan.⁹ Michael Green argued as early as 2001 that Japan is reluctantly embracing increased realism in its foreign policy. Daniel Kliman, writing after the start of the war on terrorism, suggests that Japan’s creeping realism is becoming a no-holds-barred realism that seemingly has more in common with American offensive realism than with the more restrained realism practiced in most other advanced industrial democracies: In the mid to long term, scholars will no longer employ moderating adjectives to describe Japan’s national strategy. American-based observers thus often imply that Japan’s new realism is slowly converging with American realism.¹⁰ However, these observers usually fail to note that American realism has been a moving target and that it became increasingly offensive if not revisionist in character, morphing under the George W. Bush administration into neoconservatism. Given that Japan has long demonstrated a commitment to defend national territory, claims about Japan emerging as a normal nation imply a shift toward exercising strategically offensive military power overseas. Overall, these claims about becoming a normal power have an open-ended quality to them. Little attempt is made to identify the limits of this new realism.

Does Public Opinion Have a Role?

The claim that democratic Japan is undergoing a fundamental shift in its grand strategy as the country emerges as a normal military power willing to deploy military force overseas raises the question of whether public opinion is causing this shift or preventing it, or whether public opinion even matters in Japanese policy making. More fundamentally, is Japanese public opinion coherent, stable, and influential? Is it an independent variable in the policy-making process or a dependent variable reflecting elite manufactured policy? If Japanese public opinion is coherent, stable, and influential, what are its attitude structures, and how are these reflected in Japan’s foreign policy? Finally, have the answers to these questions changed over time, or have the nature and role of public opinion been stable in postwar democratic Japan?

Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security argues that behind Japan’s postwar defensive defense posture lay the reality of a democratic Japan where this posture was backed by public opinion, the opinion of a public who were often distrustful of the state’s ability to control or wisely wield the sword. As I argue in later chapters, Japanese public opinion was never pacifist or as opposed to all forms of military power as has often been claimed. Consequently, its recent evolution does not live up to the radical transformation many analysts see.

Many observers hail recent changes in Japanese security policy as marking the emergence of a more muscular and reliable ally,¹¹ while others see this as a dreaded counterrevolution, heralding a return to 1930s-style aggressive militarism.¹² Behind both views lay, in various guises, an elitist perspective of public opinion in Japan as unstable, moody, incoherent, or self-indulgently idealistic, moldable by self-interested elites, or, at best, irrelevant. This view stems in part from traditional ideas about the relationship between elites and the masses, ideas captured in the Meiji-era slogan of kanson minpi, or revere the bureaucrats, despise the people. Even in contemporary Japan, policy elites sometimes dismiss the idea that politicians should listen to public opinion as mobocracy, or shugūseiji.¹³ In part this view emerges from an elitist school in the American study of public opinion, the so-called Almond Lippmann consensus, which is discussed in Chapter 2 and tested in the rest of the book. In part, it reflects a self-indulgent smugness, or pervasive insecurity, among policy elites, regardless of nationality, including us academics, about the necessity of elite leadership for guiding mass opinion. One of the main findings of this book is that this elitist view of Japanese foreign policy is largely wrong. Japanese public opinion toward security is stable and coherent and evolves in intelligible and generally rational ways.

Why Japanese Public Opinion Matters

This study finds that Japanese public opinion matters. Regarding the main focus of this book, the public remains overwhelmingly opposed to deploying the Japanese military overseas for combat operations. The ambivalent and conditional support that Japanese public opinion gave to deployments to the Indian Ocean and Iraq reflects not a change in public opinion but rather the extremely modest and noncombat nature of these deployments. Rather than hawkish elites molding public opinion, public opinion has molded and constrained the overseas deployment plans of hawkish elites.

Although much recent research has pointed to pacifist norms and anti-militarist political culture as a major constraint and influence on policy,¹⁴ very little has been published in English regarding Japanese public opinion as an independent variable affecting security policy since the 1970s.¹⁵ Given the tendency to dismiss public opinion already discussed, the omission of public opinion from studies of Japanese foreign policy is not surprising. Rethinking Japanese Public Opinion and Security intends to fill this void.

Although this book is primarily about how public opinion influences foreign policy in Japan, it also contributes to the nascent field of comparative public opinion. As Ole Holsti observes, there is an unfulfilled need to place research about U.S. public opinion in a broader comparative context. This is especially important in terms of the opinion-policy linkage, which is by far the least well developed of the areas of public opinion research.¹⁶ In many ways this volume parallels Richard Sobel’s 2001 study examining how U.S. public opinion constrains U.S. overseas intervention, thereby helping to elucidate the impact of public opinion in democratic decision making regarding the projection of military force overseas. In one respect this book goes beyond that study by heeding Sobel’s call for future case studies focusing on important distinctions: the types of involvement, from humanitarian relief to military conflict.¹⁷ The sharp and enduring distinction the Japanese public draws between humanitarian and reconstruction missions on the one hand and combat missions on the other is one of the central findings of this book.

This study also has broader significance for a second reason: International public opinion regarding the war on terrorism, the use of military force, and attitudes toward the United States has been grabbing headlines and generating large multinational comparative opinion surveys, such as the Pew Center for the People and the Press polls and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs polls, the results of which often make headline news in the United States and elsewhere.¹⁸ The burning question for American policy makers and the public at large after 9/11 has been, Why do they hate us? Anomalously, Japan has often been omitted from these surveys, and this book aims to bring Japan back into the debate.

Although there is very little hatred of the United States in Japan, Japanese public opinion has often reacted in highly negative ways to the war on terrorism. Thus, in addition to shedding light on how public opinion affects Japan’s security strategy, this book also offers insights into how Japanese public opinion toward the United States and its war on terrorism diverges or converges with that found elsewhere. Japan is important for understanding global public opinion because of its distinctive mix of generally favorable views of the United States combined with strong opposition to the war in Iraq and skepticism about the use of military power to prosecute the war on terrorism or, more generally, as a foreign policy instrument. Japanese public opinion also matters in this larger context because Japan is the world’s third largest economy, a leading industrial and mature democracy, one of the world’s oldest non-Western democracies, and a leading East Asian democracy.

Finally, this book is also relevant for the debate in Washington about what the United States can expect from Japan as an ally. As noted above, many observers see Japan emerging as a normal military power that will play a more significant role as a supporter of U.S. military operations throughout the world, if not as the Britain of Asia. This view assumes that a decline in so-called Japanese pacifism has corresponded to a rise in the ability of hawkish elites to influence public opinion and more generally have their way in policy making. This perspective has influenced Washington policy elites to place greater military demands on Japan.

During a visit in early 2007, then Vice President Dick Cheney called on Japan to play a greater role in Iraq and Afghanistan to support the US-led war on terrorism. This call came after the withdrawal of the GSDF (Ground Self-Defense Forces) from Samawah the previous summer following a two-year-plus deployment and on top of a then-continuing three-year-plus ASDF (Air Self-Defense Forces) transport mission between Kuwait and Iraq (this mission ended in early 2009) and a then-ongoing multiyear MSDF (Maritime Self-Defense Forces) rear-area logistical support deployment in the Indian Ocean.¹⁹ Similarly, a new Armitage report, issued in 2007, echoed the famous 2000 Armitage report call for Japan to emerge as the Britain of Asia by suggesting that Japan now seeks to play a global military role. Specifically, the 2007 report encourages Washington to support Tokyo as a growing global power.²⁰

Given this perspective, it is not surprising that many in Washington were blindsided by developments in 2007, when Japan, inexplicably from their view, stopped marching toward normal nation status and started pulling back from its overseas military support for the United States. Prime Minister Abe Shinzō led the ruling LDP (Liberal Democratic Party)–Kōmei ruling coalition to disastrous defeat in the July 2007 upper house election by making this election a referendum on constitutional reform, especially the war-renouncing Article 9, and on promoting a greater overseas military role.²¹

After the LDP-led coalition lost control of the upper house as a result of this massive defeat, Abe resigned, and his successor Fukuda Yasuo abandoned Abe’s ambitions for a larger international military role and struggled to overcome domestic opposition to maintaining even a reduced level of noncombat support for the U.S. war on terrorism. In turn, Fukuda’s successor, Asō Tarō, although a hawk like Abe, continued Fukuda’s policy of avoiding constitutional reform and deployments to conflict zones like Afghanistan. Observers in Washington were blindsided by these developments because they underestimated the influence of Japanese mass opinion and misunderstood the recent evolution in public attitudes that underlies this opinion.

Organization

Following this introduction to the theme of this book, the remainder of this volume is divided into nine chapters. Chapter 2 presents two competing theories of public opinion and its influence on policy, elitism, and pluralism, and it shows how these two theories are tested in this book. The rest of the chapter outlines Japanese public attitudes toward security; introduces a model of elite influence on public attitudes based on demonstration effects; outlines several hypotheses about the conditions under which measurable public opinion is likely to influence, or not influence, policy; and explains the methodology used in this book.

Chapter 3 presents survey data measuring Japanese mass attitudes about the utility of military force in the abstract and in a number of real-world contexts, results that are consistent with the attitudinal defensive realism outlined in Chapter 2. This chapter also examines Japanese public perceptions of the U.S. ally, as refracted through the public’s underlying security attitudes. Two aspects of public opinion toward the United States are identified as key, fear of entrapment in U.S. wars and trust or mistrust of the United States.

Chapter 4 reevaluates the extent to which Japanese public opinion was pacifist during the Cold War versus the extent to which mistrust of the state combined with fear of entrapment in American wars conspired to limit support for the SDF (Self-Defense Forces) and the U.S. alliance. It also shows how the gradual dissipation of mistrust of the state and the end of the Vietnam War caused the public to become more supportive of the U.S. alliance and more accepting of the SDF as a valued disaster-relief organization with additional value for territorial defense. This chapter also shows the influence public opinion had in limiting elite attempts to dispatch the SDF overseas or expand defense spending.

Chapter 5 provides a case study of the first Gulf War in 1990–1991 that tests the influence of public opinion on elite plans to dispatch the SDF overseas for a combat-related mission and finds that public opinion played a decisive role in quashing the planned dispatch. Chapter 6 includes a case study, examining the influence of public opinion in shaping the nature and limits of new legislation allowing SDF units to be dispatched overseas for the first time to participate in U.N. peacekeeping. The rest of this chapter considers how public opinion reacted to and influenced actual overseas deployments, its response to and influence on