The cultural formulation of national security policy in the United States and Japan

Although Japan and the United States are two of the world's most powerful and wealthy nations and share many of the same security concerns, they differ in the approaches they adopt towards formulating national security policy. In the post-World War II period, Japan has followed a middle course between pacifism and the overt militarism of the pre-World War II years. The United States, by contrast, appears prone to extremism in its formulations of national security policy, forsaking compromise or middle positions in favor of all-or-nothing propositions. I argue that this difference is best understood culturally. This project presents a culturally informed analysis of pivotal moments in American and Japanese history in order to explain otherwise puzzling contemporary American and Japanese strategic choices, specifically Japanese military expansion and American movement towards deployment of a national missile defense. I focus on moments during which understandings of national security have been contested: in the United States, I focus on the Spanish American War, the end of World War II, and the contemporary national missile defense debate. In Japan, I concentrate on the Russo-Japanese War, the end of World War II, and current Japanese military expansion, including the expanding roles of the Self-Defense Forces and debates over Constitutional revision. In each period, I focus on the debates surrounding these reformulations of national security policy---what is taken for granted, what is excluded, and what become dominant understandings. In each case study, I investigate discourses prominent in the contemporary debates, but which also have generated academic attention in other contexts. In the United States, I examine the discourses of threat perception, faith in technology, and understandings about security; in Japan, I examine the discourses of security and national identity. I ground each debate in its historical context as well as compare the debates cross-temporally to investigate both the generation and continuity of American and Japanese formulations of national security policy, formulations which, in their differences, demonstrate their cultural underpinnings.