Japan's Security Identity: From a Peace State to an International State.

• Author: Envall, H.D.P.
• Position: Book review

Japan's Security Identity: From a Peace State to an International State. By Bhubhindar Singh. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013. Hardcover: 212pp.

How have Japan's security policies changed from the Cold War period to the post-Cold War period? In Japan's Security Identity: From a Peace State to an International State, Bhubhindar Singh seeks to answer this question as he traces the evolution of Japan's security policies over recent decades. The book's focus is ostensibly on the period from the end of the Cold War until the 2009 lower house election, although it also provides a comprehensive account of Japan's security policies since the 1950s. At different points, it discusses such diverse events as the creation of the 1957 Basic Policy on National Defense, the 1976 National Defense Program Outline, and the 2010 National Defense Program Guidelines, among others.

The overall aim of Japan's Security Identity is to analyze "what these changes mean for Japanese security policy and what kind of role(s) Japan would assume in ... regional and security affairs in the post-Cold War period" (p. 2). The argument, as the subtitle indicates, is that between these two periods Japan has moved from a peace state to an international-state identity. As Singh explains, the "role conceptions or identity that determine Japan's role in regional and international security affairs" have shifted, with Japanese policymakers recognizing that the country's "Cold War approach ... was inappropriate in the post-Cold War period" (p. 3).

Adopting key elements of Constructivism from International Relations theory, Singh sets up a complex conceptual framework in which the "normative context" of Japan's security policymaking is a key variable engendering a "transformation of Japan's security identity and its resultant security policy" (p. 3). According to Singh, Japan's normative context consists of three dimensions: (1) the scope of the country's territorial conception of national security; (2) the extent to which the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) operate internationally; and (3) the "institutional culture embedded within the policymaking structure" or the policymaking regime (pp. 3-4). The shift from peace state to international state, therefore, can be understood as the outcome of a shift in this normative context--from a narrow, territorial, Yoshida-bound, limited security identity to a more regional and international, revisionist and expanded security identity (pp. 4-5).

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