Japan's militarization: from reactive to proactive antimilitarist strategic culture

• Main Author: Kim, Soyoung
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2025
• Subjects: Social Sciences; Japan; Security; Strategic culture; Geopolitics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181954
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Japan has increasingly alleviated the legal, budgetary, and ideological constraints on the Self-Defense Forces’ (SDF) scope of activities and capabilities since the end of the Cold War. Accordingly, Japan’s growing contribution to international security has been abundantly researched but not well understood. The prevailing analysis is that Japan’s postwar antimilitarist constraints on exercising military force have eroded due to the intensifying threats from China, North Korea, and Russia. However, this reflects a simplistic and incoherent understanding of antimilitarism and how it influences Japan’s security policymaking, which overlooks the nuanced interaction between the normative and material push and pull factors that have relaxed the constraints on Japan’s security policies. This dissertation attempts to answer the question, how has the pace and extent of Japan’s militarization been influenced by antimilitarist strategic culture? My central argument is that Japan’s militarization is explained by a shift in Japan’s strategic culture from an overreaching reactive antimilitarism to a specific, security-aware proactive antimilitarism. Briefly, I define strategic culture as a set of strategic thinking and practices that provide guidance on questions and choices related to war and peace and the use of military force. I explain that the Japanese public’s immediate reaction to the devastation of war formed part of a ‘reactive antimilitarism’ that prescribed an intense fear of the SDF. But as the SDF’s relationship with policymaking and society improved, the contours of antimilitarist strategic culture were reestablished as a precaution against excessive use of military force rather than against the SDF in general. I call this ‘proactive antimilitarism’. To demonstrate this shift, I conduct two case studies – ‘Military doctrine’ and the ‘SDF’s place in politics and society’. Methodologically, I adopt a critical realist approach to strategic culture, which overcomes the epistemological dichotomy between the normative and the material by analyzing the causal effects of a variety of ontological structures that affect social reality.