This previously unpublished working paper on the importance of restoring Japanese political sovereignty was originally written in the late spring of 2019. As the importance of defending Taiwan has once again returned to the news, the issues presented in this paper are now clearer then ever. As this paper outlines, the current Japanese political order was established solely for the utility of protecting American hegemony in Asia after the Second World War. Steeped in the shame of defeat, the Japanese constitution, written solely by American occupiers, must be revisited, if not completely voided. The time for American-enforced Japanese pacificism has ended. The only way to defend Japan from the aggressors that surround her is to reclaim Japanese sovereignty and restore the nation’s military forces, establishing a modern, capable strike force that will rival that of the world’s nuclear superpowers.

Introduction and Background

Japan now stands at a geopolitical crossroads. Since the end of the Second World War, Japan has been subject to a constitution which bars it from maintaining offensive military capacities and has almost exclusively depended on the military power of the United States to ensure its continued national security. As the geopolitical situation has evolved since the end of the Cold War, China has quickly risen as a great power in Asia, swiftly replacing Japan as the world’s second largest economy and is now on the path to restructuring the power balance in East Asia around Chinese geopolitical interests. As China has become increasingly belligerent in Asia, indicated by its hardline approach to the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, as well as its ambitious plan to expand its global soft power through the Belt and Road Initiative, Japan has increasingly found itself taking a backseat to the expansion of Chinese interests in its immediate geopolitical neighborhood. In addition to the rise of a confident Chinese great power, Japan must also confront increasing uncertainties in its alliance with the United States. With the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, political rhetoric in the United States took a decidedly inward turn, as Trump and his supporters embraced a form of populist nationalism that was heavily critical of the United States’ security and diplomatic commitments abroad. President Trump has repeatedly singled out Japan as not paying its “fair share” for the continued role of US military power in Japan and the rest of Asia. Compounding this uncertainty, the Japanese government has recently been forced to contend with a domestic population that has become increasingly wary of American troops on its territory, especially on the southernmost prefecture of Okinawa, which hosts about 62% of the total American troops stationed in Japan, despite accounting for about 0.6% of Japan’s landmass. With increasing uncertainty externally, as well as rising dissatisfaction domestically, the Japanese government is being pushed to recognize that the current status quo on security issues is increasingly inadequate, and Japan’s defense agreements need to be reassessed as a result.

Japan’s post-war status quo is made up of two fundamental legal components: Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution (the “Pacifist Clause”), and the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan (in conjuncture with the Status of Forces Agreement). Together, this legal framework has established the foundation of Japanese national security policy since the end of the Second World War, and has guaranteed the Japanese adherence to a policy of pacifism whilst also guaranteeing the continued presence of US troops in Japan. As this paper will demonstrate, the security status quo in Japan is inherently problematic, as it surrenders to US forces the exclusive responsibility of ensuring national security and continued sovereignty of Japanese territory. As the constitution legally prohibits the maintenance of military forces, Japan’s ability to adapt to a changing geopolitical landscape in the increasingly volatile East Asian region is limited. As this paper will argue, if Japan is to remain a meaningful regional power in Asia, Article 9 and the US-Japan defense agreement must be fundamentally reconsidered. Much scholarly literature has been written on the topic of Japanese security issues and constitutional revision, particularly in the Anglosphere. This paper will challenge common assertions made by many of these scholars, several of which have warned strongly against revision of the pacifist constitution. Japan scholars Lawrence Repeta and Karl Gustafsson have each produced articles in recent years aimed at warning against what they deemed to be the dangers of constitutional revision and the “abandonment of pacifism”. Repeta has criticized the Abe Administrations plan to amend Japan’s Article 9 as a “dangerous” threat to the country’s liberal democracy. Repeta’s argument that legalizing the use of military force is a threat to Japan’s democracy is a significant conceptual stretch, as it ignores the relative success of other post-war liberal democracies, such as Germany. Unfortunately, this sentiment that Japan is somehow at risk of militarism is not unique to these authors, but is a widely-held position among scholars of Japan in the English language. Other scholars such as Stephen Green and Christopher Hughes have linked the issue of constitutional revision to the specter of nationalism and highlighted the Japanese government’s ties to nationalist organizations. While these authors express valid concerns and draw understandable conclusions from the evidence they present, the scholarships fails to practically examine the politics of constitutional revision through the lens of Japan’s national security. There is a void in global security scholarship that downplays that rise of geopolitical security threats in the Asia-Pacific region; threats that have continued to put pressure on Tokyo to normalize its military capabilities and take a more autonomous approach to its mutual defense agreements with the United States. Lionel Fatton, in his 2018 piece on Japan’s shifting security dilemmas, produced what could be argued to be the first real attempt in scholarship to present Japan’s national security threats as an impetus to policy revision. While Fatton stops short of concluding that constitutional revision is a necessary step to guaranteeing the security of the Japanese state, his work provides a useful starting point in order to understand the challenges facing Japan in its regional neighborhood. This paper will expand on this concept, arguing that when viewed through the lens of realism, Japan’s primary national security concern ought to be the protection of its own sovereignty and interests. As a result, this paper will demonstrate that if Japan is to remain a meaningful regional power in Asia, Article 9 and the US-Japan defense agreement must be fundamentally reconsidered. Understanding Japan’s national security dilemma through the lens of realism demonstrates the ways in which the status quo not only complicates Japan’s ability to protect its sovereignty, but also leaves Japan in a state of precarious dependency on US military capacity, a situation that leaves Japan excessively vulnerable to external political uncertainties.

National Interest and a Framework on Sovereignty

The most significant obstacle to a meaningful re-examination of the status quo in Japanese security studies has been a strict adherence to the post-war order among both scholarship and politicians. With the defeat of Japan at the end of the Second World War, the United States vision for an American-led world order was expressed clearly in occupied Japan. With the 1947 constitution, which had been drafted by American occupation forces, the importance of liberal-democratic and internationalist values was outlined as a legal obligation of the state. The preface to the constitution reads “We believe that no nation is responsible to itself alone, but that laws of political morality are universal; and that obedience to such laws is incumbent upon all nations who would sustain their own sovereignty and justify their sovereign relationship with other nations.” This political worldview, enshrined in the constitution itself, defines the purpose of the Japanese state as one that not only has a responsibility to Japan, but to the global community. It is important to consider the context of such a clause, as it was written to serve two purposes. First, it was intended to ensure that Japan no longer posed a military threat to the United States or its allies, and second, it was meant to establish Japan as a permanent staging ground for American military forces in the East Asian region. As a result, modern academic scholarship on the topic of Japanese security studies have adopted a similar worldview, perceiving the laws of political morality as universal principles that should not be challenged or broken. This is especially true among American scholarship, which has repeatedly criticized the efforts of the Abe government to initiate a debate over constitutional revision. Using words such as “dangerous” and “militaristic”, scholars such as Lawrence Repeta, Steven Green, and Adam Liff have repeatedly characterized Japan’s efforts at reassessing the security status quo as misguided. This paper seeks to push back on these commonly-held assertions in scholarship that Japan’s adherence to a pacifist, internationalist worldview are an indispensable characteristic of Japanese politics and regional security. Instead, it is critical that issues of Japanese national security are examined through the lens of defensive realism, with special attention payed to the protection of Japan’s sovereignty. As international relations theorist David Dessler writes, the most important enduring practice of international politics, even among international institutions, is the respect for the sovereignty of states. If one considers the protection of sovereignty to be the most fundamental component of international relations, it also implies that the most critical responsibility of a domestic government is to defend the sovereignty of the nation-state. When seen through this framework, it becomes apparent that Japan’s legally-enforced dependency on the United States as the guarantor of its national security violates the basic principles of sovereignty. Furthermore, international relations theorist Robert Keohane explains that the very core of the principle of sovereignty is “that the state is subject to no other state and has full and exclusive powers within its jurisdiction without prejudice to the limits set by applicable law.” When we consider this conceptualization of state sovereignty, it is clearly apparent that the current status quo in Japanese national security policy is an inherent violation of the principles of state sovereignty. In light of Keohane’s definition, the limits set by applicable law in the case of Japan are embodied in the Japanese constitution itself, which, as a result of its introduction by a foreign power, surrenders significant aspects of Japanese sovereignty to an external state. As a result, Japan’s constitution in and of itself is a violation of state sovereignty, which fundamentally violates the national interests of the state. When viewed in terms of realism, we are able to determine that Japan’s government has a duty only to defend its national interests, which fundamentally depend on the integrity of state sovereignty.

Article 9 as a Violation of State Sovereignty

The Japanese constitution is unique, or by some scholarly accounts “peculiar”, in that it legally codifies a state policy of pacifism. We can trace the origins of this constitutional pacifism to the end of the Second World War, when United States forces occupied Japan and sought to rebuild the state’s political structures following its defeat. To ensure that Japan’s would never again have the ability to wage a war of aggression in Asia or abroad, occupational authorities led by Douglas MacArthur proposed a new constitution that would enshrine pacifism and prevent the state from legally maintaining a military. As this paper has discussed, pacifism was outlined as a guiding principle within the opening lines of the constitution, but the legal constraints are further developed in the body of the document. Article 9 of the postwar constitution reads:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

The text of Article 9, as outlined above, places significant legal constraints on the Japanese government, aimed at delegitimizing the use of force by the state as well as surrendering the right of the state to maintain material war potential. The premise for such a clause is rooted in the hope that Japan would continue to operate within a liberal democratic world order “based on justice and order,” which clearly reflects the American vision for the postwar international order espoused during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Since its ratification, Article 9 has been the most contentious component of the postwar constitution in Japan, and several attempts have been made to revise it. While these attempts have largely been unsuccessful, successive Japanese governments from the 1950s to the present have been successful at enacting “reinterpretations” of the article and the way in which it translates to policy. Such interpretations have allowed for the establishment of military force in limited capacity, as Japan now operates a defensive military force known as the Self-Defense Forces (SDF). While the SDF operates an army, navy, air force, and coast guard, the Japanese government has been careful to define the role of this force as inherently defensive, limiting its role in overseas conflict as to not violate the text of Article 9. As a result, the primary function of the SDF has been to assist in disaster relief, such as following the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake and 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster. The establishment of the SDF was controversial from its founding in the 1950s. In order to ensure the legality of the organization under Article 9, the law establishing the SDF referred to “ground, air, and maritime self-defense forces”, which intentionally avoided the words “land, sea, and air forces” as outlawed in the constitution. Such attempts at working around the constitution demonstrates the clear desire among Japan’s political elite to resist the pacifist clause in the face of external threats. The legal constraints placed on the SDF have continued to be the subject of great debate and discussion, especially in recent years. With the increase in North Korean missile tests in 2017, for example, and the violation of Japanese airspace over Hokkaido by North Korean missiles, there were serious questions raised around whether or not Japan had the legal basis to intercept such an attack. The legality of the use of force in order to defend the integrity of Japanese borders is fundamentally brought into question by the continued validity of Article 9. Whereas Robert Keohane argued that the protection of a state’s sovereignty is of fundamental importance to the integrity of the nation-state system, the Japanese constitution surrenders this exclusive right to the international community.

Mutual Defense: The Role of the United States

Article 9, and the restrictions it places on the Japanese right to self-defense, are made fundamentally possible through mutual defense agreements with the United States. The second portion of Japan’s postwar legal framework, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan is a defense framework that obligates the United States to defend Japan in the event of a war or other national security threat. Along with the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement, this legal framework mandates the permanent presence of about 50,000 US troops on Japanese territory at any given time. Historically, these troops were meant as a deterrence to the Soviet Union, but with the end of the Cold War, the purpose of this force has largely become a deterrent to Chinese aggression. The presence of a large contingent of US troops in Japan is fundamental to the success of Article 9, as it allows Japan to maintain a policy of pacifism domestically, while depending on the United States in the event that military force is necessitated. This outsourcing of military power, however, violates the principles of sovereignty that this paper has previously established. The status quo in Japanese national security policy has forced the Japanese government to operate as a sort of American client state, providing strategic positioning to US troops in exchange for the defense of its borders. Despite the framing of this agreement as “mutual defense”, Japan exists in a precarious and coercive position with the United States. The existence of Article 9 legally stunts the ability of the Japanese government to assert its own sovereignty, necessitating the continued presence of US troops, regardless of the will of the Diet or the electorate. With this in mind, it can be concluded that the mutual defense agreements between the United States and Japan are not treaties in the traditional sense, as Japan has no choice but to accommodate American interests so long as Article 9 remains in effect, leaving the government with little choice but to continue to uphold the terms of the defense agreement.

The presence of US troops is not only a violation of sovereignty, but has also harmed Japanese national interests by hampering its ability to negotiate with its neighbors. For example, there has been significant diplomatic challenges in recent negotiations between Russia and Japan over a formal end to hostilities stemming from the Second World War. As Japan entered negotiations with Russia in late 2018 over the handover of sovereignty of four northern islands seized by Soviet forces at the end of the war, the Russian government expressed grave concern over the possibility that US troops could be stationed on the islands. Russian concerns in these discussions have centered around the US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement, which would guarantee a US right to station troops at any site on Japanese territory, potentially allowing the establishment of American military installations in close proximity to Russian territory. As a result of this impasse, the Japanese and Russian governments have been unable to come to an agreement over the terms of a territorial handover. While the strategic value of islands such as these is negligible, it is important to consider the larger implications and baggage that accompany a continued US troop presence on Japanese territory. This example demonstrates that Japan is subject to a weaker negotiating position as a result of poor US-Russia relations, illustrating the reality that Japan’s diplomatic position cannot be fully separated from that of the United States.

Revising the Status Quo

This paper has illustrated some of the numerous complications to Japanese sovereignty and national interests posed by Article 9 and the US-Japan mutual security agreements. It is important, however, to clarify that various Japanese governments have made attempts to revise these policies at different points throughout the postwar era. Opposition to Article 9 and to the presence of US troops in Japan is not a new phenomenon, but the contemporary geopolitical climate provides a particular impetus for change. While the postwar period was defined by the Cold War and its ideological struggle between the US and Soviet Union, the 21st century has brought a much more nuanced and complex geopolitical reality to Asia. With the rise of China as an economic and military great power in Asia, Japan is now confronted with an existential threat in its immediate neighborhood. While it is highly unlikely that the Chinese government has a vested interest in an Asian war, as it almost certainly does not, the animosity and competing nationalisms in Japan and China nonetheless remain a significant point of concern. As recently as 2012, when Japan nationalized the disputed Senkaku Islands, these competing nationalisms boiled over, spurring a diplomatic crisis between the two countries. While these islands are strategically important in the region, the deterioration in relations and the enraged response among Chinese citizens undoubtedly surprised Japanese officials, who had sought to avoid a standoff. While this diplomatic crisis did not lead to military intervention, it did prove that Japan was in a precarious position if it were to attempt to assert its sovereignty over disputed territories in the future. Since then, Japan has had similar diplomatic rows with South Korea, where military and territorial disagreements have led to a rapid deterioration in relations. These minor diplomatic spats are indicative of a larger systemic issue in Japan’s national security status quo, as it continues to exist in a state of ever-increasing precariousness.
In light of these changing geopolitical realities and the evolving threats facing Japan, a re-examination of the status quo is increasingly necessary. As this paper has already established, Article 9 and the US-Japan Mutual Defense agreements are critical components of the postwar national security framework and must be revisited. Article 9 cannot exist without the presence of US troops on Japanese territory, which means that if the constitution were to be revised, so too must Japan’s security agreements with the United States. Article 9 fundamentally surrenders the right of force and defense of the state to the United States, and leaves limited decision-making power in the hands of Japanese lawmakers. The full repeal of Article 9, and the legitimization of the use of force by the Japanese government would empower lawmakers and improve Japan’s negotiating position in Asia, rather than being tethered to an increasingly unreliable US government. Sheila Smith, in her 2019 book on Japanese Security studies Japan Rearmed, makes the argument that such a change in national security outlook is already occurring within the Japanese government. She argues that the Japanese state, now more than ever, “value their military as an instrument of national policy” and “has prepared for the possible use of force in and around its territory.” These changes in perception by the Japanese government further demonstrate the uncertainty and impetus for change among Japan’s politicians and military elites. If the assertion of sovereignty by the Japanese state is in the national interest, which this paper argues is the case, then the repeal of Article 9 would be a necessary and important step in ensuring Japan’s interests are protected. In addition to this, such a revision would need to also accompany a reassessment of Japan’s security relationship with the United States. Rather than the current arrangement, which treats Japan as a junior partner, or client, it would be in Japan’s national interest to pursue a military partnership that removes the mandatory presence of US troops on its soil, and prioritizes joint-military exercises that mirror American arrangements with its other allies around the world. If Japan were to reclaim its right to use force to defend its own sovereignty and reduce its dependency on the United States, issues of security in East Asia could be handled through a more robust partnership and system of cooperation than currently exists as a result of the status quo.

Conclusion

Japan’s national security policy grew out of the American need to create liberal-democratic allies in East Asia during the Cold War. Such a system remains in place today, and does not adequately protect Japan’s national interests in light of changing geopolitical realities in the region. As this paper has demonstrated, Japan’s postwar constitution, with Article 9’s ban on the legal use of force through the military, unnecessarily stunts Japan’s ability to defend itself and assert its sovereignty over its borders. Through a lens of realism, this paper has argued that it is within the national interest for a state to maintain the right to assert its own sovereignty, free form the influence of foreign powers. As a result of Article 9 and the mutual defense agreements between Japan and the United States, the Japanese state has been denied this fundamental sovereign right. With the rise of further external threats such as an increasingly belligerent China, Japan has been forced to confront the decreasing utility of the status quo to protecting Japanese interests. The presence of a large contingent of American troops on Japanese has damaged Japan’s ability to negotiate abroad, and fundamentally linked Japan’s diplomatic positions to that of the United States. As the United States continues to question to durability of its presence in East Asia, the Japanese state will continue to examine ways of adjusting the status quo. This paper has argued that a fundamental re-examination and repeal of Article 9 has been necessitated, which would allow the Japanese government to more freely assert its right over its own sovereignty. Such a change in the status quo would almost certainly challenge the power balance in East Asia but would allow Japan to operate as military and political equal to its regional neighbors in a way that it currently cannot. While the geopolitical situation in East Asia continues to appear uncertain, it should remain the primary focus of the Japanese government to take steps to protect national interests, and this will best be accomplished through a fundamental reimagining of Article 9, the concept of mutual defense, and the postwar national security status quo.