Published papers

This article first addresses the complex concept of norm legitimacy. For the question why states comply with international norms, neorealism attributes compliance to the imposition or threat of military and economic sanctions, while neoliberalism focuses on norms’ economic functions of, for example, reducing transaction costs. These rationalistic approaches contrast with a reflective approach in which the concept of norm legitimacy serves as a measure of how strongly norms pull states to voluntary compliance without depending on force or self-interests. In this article, drawing on Beetham's work, I advocate that the concept of norm legitimacy be understood in the intersubjective contexts of ethical values, scientific views, legal validity, and consent by a majority of states in the international community. 　Under an analytical framework of ethical, scientific, legal, and political legitimacy, this article then examines Japan’s response to an international prohibitionary norm against large-scale pelagic driftnet fishing during the period from 1989 to 1991. First, Japan did not see the norm ethically legitimate. On one side, Japan embraced the conservation value that allowed catching creatures sustainably that did not face extinction or threat of extinction. On the other side, the prohibitionary norm reflected the preservation value that called for the maximum protection of marine mammals and sea birds. Second, Japan publicly contested the scientific legitimacy of the global driftnet moratorium. Scientific uncertainty allowed Japan and the United States to take opposing interpretations. Third, Japan did not contest the legal legitimacy of the norm, which emerged out of the Law of the Sea regime, since there were no specific provisions for or against the ban on a fishing gear. Fourth, Japan decided to comply with the norm in late 1991 when it became certain that the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) would adopt a resolution by a great majority to recommend the cessation of high seas driftnet fishing. 　This article also briefly pays attention to the normative force of United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions. From the above limited case study, it could be argued that political legitimacy is an important factor in norm compliance when there is neither ethical, scientific nor legal agreement with regard to the legitimacy of the norm in question. In this sense, the UNGA is worthy to note as a global forum to generate the general will of the international community. One of the possible propositions withdrawn from the above case study is that a state will not vote against a UNGA resolution if it finds no or only a few other countries will do so. According to Marín-Bosch'es research on votes in the UNGA, however, one to three negative votes were cast in the twelve per cent of the resolutions adopted between 1946 and 1996. This article briefly tries to explain this anomaly. 　Finally, this article concludes by pointing out that states and norms affect and even constitute each other. States tries to institutionalize international norms at an international organization for a political purpose: legitimizing their own behaviors and delegitimizing those of other states. On the other hand, international norms, once institutionalized in the international community, affect state behavior by reminding policymakers of a sense of political obligation as a member of the community. A norm, after its institutionalization, also becomes a constitutive norm: a standard of behavior to locate states “in” or “out of ” the international community. Taking this view, I regard the rationalistic and the reflective approaches to international relations as complementary rather than alternative.

Since 1987, when Japan was forced to end its commercial whaling, the country has conducted “scientific” whaling, despite criticisms from the United States and many other developed countries. Given the fact that Japan has often responded to pressures from the United States, it is puzzling that Japan has been resistant to the United States’ demand to end Japan’s whaling and that it has continued whaling under the name of scientific research. 　In this article, I would like to make three points. First, the United States is now materially and normatively too constrained to take unilateral action against Japan’s scientific whaling. The United States cannot force Japan to stop the practice, partly because it lost a major coercive means of leverage over Japan when it excluded all Japanese fishing boats from the American Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Moreover, an international norm against unilateral actions to deal with environmental challenges outside the jurisdiction of the importing country has been growing since the early 1990s, evidenced at a dispute-resolution panel of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). 　Second, Japan has defied the American pressure despite weak domestic pressure in favor of protecting the whaling industry. The industry is too small to pressure the government to continue scientific whaling, and most Japanese consumers are indifferent to this political issue. Thus, interest group politics does not provide a sufficient explanation for Japan’s exceptional resistance to the American pressure. 　Third, the key to understanding Japan’s persistence is the illegitimacy of the U.S. demand in the eyes of Japanese policymakers. First, the demand does not fit with existing legal norms, scientific beliefs, or moral principles. Second, it pretends to reflect world opinion but in actuality does not. Third, Japanese policymakers feel a sense of enmity toward their counterparts and environmentalists in anti-whaling countries. Ironically, international pressure has increased the domestic legitimacy of the practice and has prolonged the life of the industry. 　One policy implication of this argument is that anti-whaling countries should recognize the right of sovereign states to conduct not only scientific but also commercial whaling, under the condition that it targets only abundant species on a sustainable basis. It is more productive to exert pressure on Japan to do its best to avoid the extinction of any whale species, for example by confiscating illegal whale meat.

In this article, the author analyzes the changing perception held by Japanese policymakers regarding Japan’s state identities, by conducting a computer-assisted content analysis of the Defense White Papers published annually between 1976 and 2006. The KH Coder, a computer program, assigns a particular code to a sentence if the sentence includes all or part of the words associated to the code. Then, it calculates a ratio of the identically coded sentences in the designated entire text for each year. The author also attempts to capture the discursive logic of the official reports about the roots of Japan’s identities and their policy implications, by carrying out cognitive mapping. 　The codes that appear frequently in the editions published during the Cold War period are “Member of the West” (nishigawa no ichiin) and “Economic Power” (keizai taikoku). The appearance ratios of the former code are high in the texts of the 1980s. The perception of Japan as a “Member of the West” seems to have been affected by that of the Soviet Union as a military threat. On the other hand, the rise of Japan and the decline of the United States in the economic field seem to have strengthened the perception of Japan as an “Economic Power” since the late 1970s. In the 1980s, both of the self-definitions were used to emphasize the necessity of defense build-up in Japan. 　The appearance ratios of the code “Peace-Loving Nation” (heiwa kokka) are stable in the entire period under study. This identity seems to have derived from the constitutional resolution of never repeating the horrors of war. In the late 1970s and the late 1980s, the self-description of Japan as such was linked to the need to strengthen Japan’s non-military international contributions. After the end of the Cold War, however, this identity became increasingly more compatible with military means as long as they are not related to combat. 　The Defense White Papers published during the Cold War Period avoid the use of the term “alliance” (dômeikoku). By contrast, the frequency ratio of this code is in the general trend of increase in the 1990s and peaked at 2006 when Japan and the United States reached an agreement on the force posture realignment of U.S. Forces in Japan. Instability in the Asia-Pacific region and the global war on terrorism seem to have enhanced Japan’s collective identity with the United States and then have led to such new missions of the Japan Self Defense Forces (JSDF) as international peace cooperation activities and response to unstable situations in areas surrounding Japan. 　As a result of the content analysis explained above, this article makes three arguments. First, after the end of the Cold War, the alliance with the United States replaced its two other identities, a member of the West and an economic power. The perception of Japan as a peace-loving nation was stable, although its meaning was changing slowly. Second, important sources of identity transformation include: 1) changes in the distribution of material capabilities among states, 2) the occurrence of major wars, terrorist activities, and international crises, and 3) a stronger sense of common values and stronger expectations of burden sharing from the United States, which result from factors 1) and 2). Third, changes in Japan’s state identities affected a shift of policy emphasis from defense build-up to the expansion of the JSDF’s missions beyond homeland defense.

Since the Gulf War, the United States has built up a joint information system, which is interoperable among the military services--the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. The application of information technology to the military system has contributed to maintain the prominent position of the United States in international politics. According to Kenneth Waltz’s theory, however, the United States cannot sit on its laurels. His balance-of-power theory leads us to expect states to emulate the successful policies of others. 　João Resende-Santos has developed a “neorealist theory of emulation.” This theory contains two noteworthy points. First, the timing, speed, and scale of military emulation vary in accordance with the level of threat in the surrounding security environment. Second, when the option of relying on the capabilities of other states through alliance formation (external balancing) is available, the perception of reduced threat weakens the timing, speed, and scale of military emulation. In other words, emulation, as well as innovation, is regarded as one form of arms buildup relying on one’s own capabilities (internal balancing). 　However, is the level of threat in the surrounding security environment a really decisive factor of emulation? Do the timing, speed, and scale of military imitation vary with the region of the world? Moreover, don’t states emulate others for the formation and strengthening of an alliance? By verifying these questions, it is possible to contribute theoretically to research on the international diffusion of military technology and ideas, especially the diffusion of information revolution in military affairs, on which little research has been conducted. 　This article attempts to refute Resende-Santos’ arguments, by analyzing the diffusion of the joint information system of the U.S. Armed Forces to two allies, the United Kingdom and Japan. As a result of this analysis, I make two points. First, even in regions where the levels of threat in the surrounding security environment are different, the military emulation of similar timing, speed, and scale may occur. Second, states emulate others not only for their own military buildup but also for the enhancement of their alliance through ensuring interoperability. 　The body of this article is divided into three sections. First, I describe the development of the joint information systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan during the post-Cold War period. Second, I suggest the diffusion of the joint information system from the United States to the other two countries and present a framework for analyzing emulation, a concept that is similar to but different from diffusion. Third, I consider the emulation of the U.S. military system by the United Kingdom and Japan in more detail.

This paper pays special attention to three kinds of organizational or individual actors (foreign actors, environmental policy sponsors and an industrial policy community), and to the three streams of policy, problem and politics in the parts of the Japanese policy process affected by foreign pressure. Foreign actors play the roles of policy specialists, problem pointers and political activists when they exert pressure. These actors are assisted by environmental policy sponsors, the domestic actors who support foreign pressure for their own reasons. Whether foreign pressure will bring about a policy change also depends on the autonomy of an industrial policy community, which consists of the industry under pressure and the relevant government ministry. Using the three-actor/three-stream model, this case study describes the policy process leading up to Japan's ban on imports of African elephant ivory in 1989 and tests several hypotheses drawn from the literature on political science and international relations. The conclusion of this paper is that the combination of NGO activity under the CITES regime and policy community fragmentation led to Japan's acceptance of a ban on ivory imports. It also argues that foreign pressure can lead to a policy change even without powerful environmental policy sponsors at home.

In this paper, I address the question of Japanese state-society relations under foreign pressure, offering a forum for analyzing the nature and dynamics of domestic structures in the “reactive” state. This paper mainly draws on the concept of policy community, consisting of an industry and its supervising government agency, and focuses on the resistance of a policy community to external pressures. It utilizes case studies of how foreign pressure affects a Japanese policy community and policy outcome by examining the driftnet fishing and the whaling policy communities. In the 1990s, Japan gave up high seas driftnet fishing, but not so-called research whaling. In conclusion, foreign pressure is more likely to lead to policy change when the autonomy of a policy community is low. The degree of autonomy is a function of the material, political, and emotional integrity of a policy community.

This paper attempts to analyze Japan’s conciliation of the United States regarding national targets on greenhouse gas emissions in the multilateral climate change negotiations (1990-2001) for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and for the Kyoto Protocol to the Convention. Japan’s conciliatory proposals had nothing to do with bilateral pressure from the United States. Then, why did Japan make special efforts to conciliate United States with its lenient proposals? I focus on three factors: concern for international status, the costs of the climate change regime, and domestic politics. My main argument is that the then Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) used the ‘conciliation’ of the United States in its favor as an excuse for making proposals that would emasculate the climate change regime and as a means of receiving support from the United States for differentiation of national targets.

The existing literature argues that NATO membership has been an effective incentive for the democratic control of armed forces (DCAF) in post-communist Europe. It also points out considerable delay in establishing DCAF in the countries that are not likely to be candidates for NATO membership in the near future: typically, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries (the former Soviet states excluding the three Baltic countries). On the other hand, the literature pays little attention to the role of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in this area. 　This article argues that norm setting and the international promotion of norm implementation on the OSCE platform have contributed to the domestic legalization of DCAF in the CIS states. In this argument, the OSCE is regarded, not as teacher or nanny of norms (independent actor in international politics), but as a school of norms (site or process of norm teaching). This is a case illustrating the Constructivist functions of the OSCE process to re-constitute the “democratic state” at the international level by adding a DCAF element to democracy, and then literally to constitute the legal constitutions of the former communist countries. 　The main body of this article is divided into four sections. The first section outlines the DCAF regime developed at the OSCE, which consists of the two Documents of the Copenhagen and Moscow Meetings of the Conference of the Human Dimension (1990 and 1991) and the Code of Conduct on Politico-Military Aspects of Security (1994). 　In the next two sections, I analyze norm setting and the promotion of norm implementation within the OSCE framework respectively. Legitimization based on OSCE principles, politically binding nature, and the consensus rule are three basic features of OSCE norm setting. Its activities to promote the implementation of the DCAF regime include follow-up conferences, information exchange, seminars, and comments on constitutional drafts and bills. I also identify teachers and students of the DCAF regime. 　Fourthly, this article examines the impact of the OSCE process on national legislation in the CIS region. The DCAF norms, especially democratic decision on the use of force, the political neutrality of armed forces, and a ban on irregular forces, influenced the CIS constitutions adopted or amended nearly one year after the adoption of the OSCE Code of Conduct in December 1994. At the law level, the CIS countries have enacted some or all of the laws on defense, the state of emergency, mobilization, military service, alternative service, and the status of persons since 1994.

Since the end of the Cold War, Japan’s acceptance and institutionalization of a non-combat military role to aid the US has led to its new identity as a US ally and has transformed the content of its ‘peace state’ identity. It is this role that has made these two identities more compatible. This article first attempts to measure the long-term shift in Japan’s two identities by conducting a content analysis of Japan’s Defence White Papers and then seeks to trace the formation process of Japan’s dual security identity through which it accepted and institutionalized a non-combat military role. For this analysis, the process is divided into three stages: the Cold War period when its two identities as a ‘peace state’ and a US ally were considered incompatible, the period of the 1990s when Japan started to accept and institutionalized a non-combat military role, and the period after 11 September 2001 when Japan’s dual security identity gradually got established. In the final section, the article discusses the source of a security identity shift in Japan and draws some implications for the future of its security policy.