As a result of constitutional restrictions on its use of military force, Japan has long held a reputation as a pacifist state. Yet, for more than twenty years, it has been undergoing a steady process of normalization that has seen these restrictions gradually removed or bypassed. At a time when Japan is moving toward a more proactive security policy this thesis examines the important effect procurement choices have upon both its strategic options and its regional relations. This study examines the development and structure of Japan's defence industry, assesses the threats it is required to address, and gauges the impact of domestic and foreign influence upon security policy. In addition, it raises important questions regarding the nature of Japan's strategic direction and the lack of open discussion of areas of significance. In particular, it looks at the failure of weapon choices to become more than an economic issue, despite the far broader impact of the choices made. It also considers the extent to which the threats faced by Japan have been accurately assessed, and the possible implications of narrow adherence to the US-Japan security alliance. Finally the thesis helps to address a long-standing gulf in Japan's academic community which has seen liberal academics largely standing removed from discussion of security policy on ideologically pacifist grounds. By showing that the possible choices in security policy are far broader than commonly perceived, this thesis allows and encourages a more open and active debate on Japan's future role, both in East Asia and internationally.

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This dissertation investigates the influence of Japanese conservatism on the government’s foreign policy. The core set of questions of this research consists of the following: what is the position and status of conservatism in the spectrum of post-war Japanese political thinking? How has conservative thinking (especially conservative intellectuals) affected the perceptions and behaviour of the leaders and how has the leaders’ foreign policy-making reflected their conservative thinking? What is the mechanism by which conservative thinking exerts its influence on Japan’s foreign policy-making? What are the different ways in which different Japanese prime ministers exploited conservative intellectuals and vice versa? And, how did this double-way exploitation affect foreign policy-making? To address the research questions, first the place of conservatism among post-war Japanese ideologies is examined. Post-war Japan experienced a variety of ideological trends, including the partial revival of certain pre-war ideologies such as conservatism. Second, as the dominant ideology, how conservatism affected Japanese political practices, or what is the connection between conservative thinking and foreign policy is addressed. Third, Prime Ministers Nakasone Yasuhiro, Koizumi Junichirō and Abe Shinzō are taken up as cases to study the mechanism of how conservative thought affects foreign policy-making. The role of the concept of conservatism in the policy-making process has been extensively studied in political science and international relations. Likewise, “from concept to foreign policy” is the focal question of this study. Specifically, the aim is to find out how conservative intellectuals affect real politics (realpolitik) and foreign policy. Three paths are investigated: first, direct conversions from conservative intellectuals to conservative politicians; second, conservative intellectuals acting as political advisors to the three prime ministers, thereby providing them with intellectual support; and third, conservative intellectuals disseminating their thinking in Japanese society using their own influence, and eventually affecting government policy through the force of public opinion. This study draws on Robert A. Dahl’s pluralist theory of democracy, which suggests that political outcomes arise through competitive interest groups, rejecting the assumption that the state (or government) is the sole rational actor in politics. Using this insight, the dissertation examines the plural factors contributing to the origin and formation of the prime ministers’ conservative thought, including education, early environment, family legacy, and the relationships of the three prime ministers with their political advisors. In the Conclusions, a comparison of the conservative thought and foreign policies of the three prime ministers is carried out, examined in the context of the contemporary social ethos and international environment, leading to an elucidation of the causal mechanisms linking Japanese conservatism to Japanese foreign policy.

This is a study of power in Japan's contemporary regional international relations, examined through the Critical framework of political-economy developed by Robert Cox and drawing on the thought of Antonio Gramsci. It focuses upon the countries of the Mekong Peninsula in addition to the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) project which those countries are aligning with. It is argued that far from a naturally occurring phenomena of bottom up mutual interest sharing, the GMS is an example of a 'world order' set in sub-regional terms, that Japan and its organic intellectual the Asian Development Bank are orienting Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos towards. Through the employment of quantitative and qualitative methods, carried out across the multiple countries involved in this study, this research attempts to discover the formal and informal channels of direct (relational) and indirect (structural) power that Japan exercises in order to garner the consent necessary from the elites of the Mekong economies to adapt their domestic policies towards world orders. This is hegemony understood in Critical (consent generation) rather than Realist (coercive force) terms, and the study examines the nexus reached between Japan's material, institutional and ideational power, and how these operate in the real world of the Mekong countries. It was discovered that among the highly complex histories, interactions and sheer number of projects underway in the Mekong region, a common pattern of behaviours and activities are occurring. Japan, since the mid-1980s has been reforming the former economies of Indochina to orient them towards some of the developments already successfully achieved in Thailand during the 1950s-1970s. From the end of the Cold War the GMS project was formally put in place and great efforts were made to the war-torn Indochina economies towards liberal economic reforms (not liberal democratic reforms). Once achieved, and the GMS project successfully ported into the regional framework of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Japan began shifting allegiances away from open-ended multilateralism and towards a Japan-centric set of relations. The dissertation concludes that far from being a passive or reactive state, Japan's relations with the GMS and the Mekong countries demonstrates a high degree of strategic vision, and that this agenda does not end with the sub-regional GMS. Rather, the GMS is a building block on the way towards inter-regional and trans-regional transformation that may potentially open alternate channels of politico-economic power that would fundamentally transform Southeast Asia and East Asia more broadly.

This dissertation fills a gap in the literature created by the focus of conventional International Relations approaches on the escalation and de-escalation of conflict in territorial disputes. Japan's territorial disputes, while prone to controversy and flare-ups, have not witnessed any militarised conflict in their recent histories. By shifting the focus from conflict to sovereignty the dissertation allows an examination of what does take place in Japan's territorial disputes, and provides an understanding of Japan's approach to its territorial disputes and how this approach varies across time as well as across each individual dispute. The dissertation takes a constructivist approach to the relationship between international politics and international law, constructing a conceptual framework – the sovereignty game – which is adapted to the study of Japan's territorial disputes. Simply put, in contemporary international relations, states rarely use force to conquer territory. Rather, they play the sovereignty game, in which they attempt to gain or maintain sovereignty over a disputed territory by (a) successfully undertaking exercises of sovereignty over the disputed territory, and preventing other states in the dispute from engaging in exercises of sovereignty over that territory; and (b) by gaining international recognition of sovereignty over the disputed territory. States seek to exercise sovereignty by utilising their resources (capital), and the extent to which they employ this capital is determined by the relative value of the territory in question. The dissertation applies this sovereignty game approach to each of Japan's three territorial disputes, the Liancourt Rocks dispute with South Korea, the Pinnacle Islands dispute with China and Taiwan, and the Northern Territories dispute with Russia, examining the dynamics of the sovereignty game in the post-Cold War period. The dissertation finds that, due to the different relative values of the territorial disputes, Japan's approach varies: it has taken a formal, legalistic approach to the Liancourt Rocks and Pinnacle Islands dispute – at least until the mid-2000s – using sovereignty only to preserve its existing position in the disputes. However, its approach to sovereignty in the Northern Territories dispute has been characterised by a sense of moral justice, thus it seeks to prevent all Russian exercises of sovereignty while constantly attempting to push its own. .

The existing scholarship has typically explained the emergence of modern Japan as a territorial sovereign in the late-nineteenth century to be a result of its response to Western imperialism, which paved the way for it to build its own empire. Scholars have found Japan’s motivation for drawing territorial boundaries either in the pursuit of the maintenance of independence or its entry into the international society. However their narratives do not fully explain why the process led to the establishment of Japan’s sovereignty over border zones with ambiguous territorial status, such as the Kuril Islands and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Approaching the question by investigating local developments, this thesis presents a twofold explanation for the emergence of territorial boundaries around Japan: that the rise of sovereignty had origins in the long-term decline of the border zones’ political institutions; and that Japan’s expansion into these zones was enabled by a diplomatic equilibrium (which the thesis calls the balance of favour) among the Western powers. The rise of trans-Pacific commercial activities, the decline of tributary trade in East Asia, and Russia’s strategic shift to the Far East prompted fundamental changes in the political landscape for the border zones. The Western imperialists in the 1860s and the 1870s saw it as best that Japan control these areas, because one imperial power’s territorial gain would have unleashed a scramble that none of them saw as worth fighting. The above argument provides an alternative to the conventional Japan-centred narratives of interactions between Western imperialism and the East Asians. It also adds to the historical study of the border zones by providing a comparative analysis and connecting them with a broader context. It thus bridges the historiographical gap between the diplomatic history of bakumatsu and Meiji Japan and the local histories around the archipelago.

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Au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale, avec le retour à la souveraineté, le Japon commença aussitôt à planifier la reconstruction de son économie et la création de nouveaux liens en Asie. C'est ainsi qu'il déclencha son « avancée vers le sud », à la recherche de matières premières et de marchés pour ses produits. Cependant le processus de pénétration de l'Asie du Sud-est ne fut pas seulement de nature économique mais aussi politique, et la valeur de la région dans la recherche d'une nouvelle position stratégique fut claire dans l'approche au problème indochinois, surtout après l'intensification de la guerre du Vietnam. Le Japon, désireux de contribuer de manière significative à une reconstruction régionale « après-­Vietnam », à la fin des années soixante lança une première série d'initiatives diplomatiques et de coopération dans la région entière. Ensuite les « tournants » de l'ordre bipolaire des années soixante-dix, surtout le « Nixon choc » et la chute de Saigon, ainsi qu'une majeure sensibilité vers le pays de la région, amenèrent de Tokyo à la systématisation de son approche et donc à la planification de la doctrine Fukuda. Cette première codification de la politique japonaise vers l'Asie du Sud-est est basée sur la fonction intra-régionale du Japon visant à lutter contre les tentatives hégémoniques de Pékin et Moscou et à profiter du désengagement militaire occidentale, afin de remodeler les relations avec les grandes puissances et assumer un rôle international de premier plan. / In the aftermath of World War II, after Japan had regained its sovereignty, the government started immediately planning the economic recovery and the creation of new ties in Asia. Thus it launched its "southern expansion", focused on the search of raw materials and markets for Japanese products. However, the penetration in Southeast Asia was not only an economic process, but also a political one. In the search of a new strategic role, the importance of the region became evident for Tokyo when facing the Indochinese problem, especially after the intensification of the Vietnam War. With the aim to provide a significant contribution to the regional reconstruction, even more important in the perspective of a "post-Vietnam", in the late l960s Japan launched a first set of diplomatic and economic initiatives in the whole region. The "turning points" of the Cold War in the 1970s, i.e. the "Nixon shock" and the fall of Saigon, combined to a closer attention to the expectations of Southeast Asian countries, eventually led Tokyo to the systematization of its regional approach and to the definition of the Fukuda Doctrine. In this first attempt to codify its policy towards Southeast Asia, Japan conceived its intra-regional role in opposition to the hegemonic moves of Beijing and Moscow and in connection to the Western military withdraw from the region, with the ambition to reshape its relations with the Great Powers and enhance its political standing in world affairs.