For the western press, Japan is always rising

Forbes and AP have run nearly simultaneous articles reviving the "Japan rising" meme that I thought had died with Abe Shinzo's government.

Tim Kelly of Forbes uses the occasion of the commissioning of the Hyuga — previously mentioned in this post — to argue that the launch of Japan's "first aircraft carrier since America dismantled the Imperial Navy a half century ago" is a landmark in Japan's "[creeping] away" from pacifism.

Eric Talmadge, meanwhile, uses the trick of reporting on a US-Japan joint military drill to argue that Japan's military is assuming a "more global role."

The funny thing about Talmadge's article is that it has all the pieces for a very different story, which might be headlined, "Japan remains reluctant to commit military to global role." The story mentions the Somalia dispatch occurring "after much haggling in parliament," "opposition from many Japanese who recall the disaster of the previous century's militarist misadventures" should the government send troops to Afghanistan, a quote from an expert (Eric Heginbotham of RAND) noting that "Japan is still extremely casualty sensitive," and a quote from another expert (Watanabe Tsuneo of the Tokyo Foundation) noting that "there is no consensus among ordinary citizens and politicians." One could take the same quotes and the same facts and write a completely different article talking about Japan's reluctance to play a greater role abroad, while alluding to the possibility of change.

The mistake that both Talmadge and Kelly make is to equate military capabilities with a change in intentions or policy. Kelly's article blithely dismisses the very idea that the Hyuga is anything but an aircraft carrier — and if Japan has an aircraft carrier, it must be interested in expanding its global reach. If Kelly acknowledged that the Hyuga might be something other than an aircraft carrier, as Japanese officials maintain, Kelly would not have a story, because what story is there in "Japan acquires another destroyer?" Talmadge, meanwhile, recognizes that far from enhancing its military capabilities, "Unlike China's double-digit defense spending growth, Japan's has remained flat for years." (In fact, Japan's defense budget has fallen for seven consecutive years, as discussed here.) But he then concludes that Japan has "one of the best-funded and highly regarded militaries in the world." But that is not a new development: Japan has had a high-tech and well-funded military for years. What has changed to merit having this discussion now? Not the Hyuga apparently — Talmadge actually doesn't mention it. (The only mention Kelly makes of Japan's defense spending is that Japan has "a defense budget on par with the more militarily active U.K." and that "if America ever lets Japan buy its latest state-of-the-art warplanes, Asia's pacifist nation has the cash to pay for them.")

Oddly enough, Talmadge's case seems to rest largely on the US-Japan joint missile defense program. But why does he equate a global role with the acquisition of military technology? Missile defense technology is, for Japan, explicitly local, intended "to protect the country — and the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed here — from a potential attack by its unpredictable and often belligerent neighbor, North Korea." Missile defense spending may show that Japan is taking its own defense more seriously, but I would not equate it with Japan's taking a more active global role.

I cannot help but think of everything these articles miss. No mention of the domestic political confusion that has shelved discussions of collective self-defense and constitution revision, which would be far more significant than the acquisition of a helicopter carrier. No mention of the lack of interest among many Japanese in seeing the JSDF used for missions not directly tied to Japan's security, as found in the cabinet's latest defense affairs survey (discussed here). No mention of the Asahi survey finding that many Japanese would like to see the government spend even less on defense than it is spending now. No mention of the smoldering debate between the LDP and the DPJ over Ozawa Ichiro's suggestion that perhaps Japan should consider taking greater responsibility for its own defense, while insisting that he literally meant own defense — a more robust JSDF would not be used abroad.

The puzzling thing about Japanese security policy is not that Japan has become so much more active but that it is still doing so little, despite the best efforts of some US and Japanese policymakers (and journalists like Talmadge and Kelly) to paint a picture of East Asia as unremittingly bleak and threatening for a "pacifist" country like Japan. It seems that the Japanese people will not be scared into becoming "normal." The public would still rather cheap ride on the US security guarantee, with greater role in self-defense a second-best option. But even in doing more to defend itself Japan might still not become the active global power of Talmadge's article. It is easy to imagine a Japan bristling with high-tech weapons for its maritime and air self-defense forces, intended to ensure that no intruders enter Japanese waters or airspace, perhaps while still sending unarmed contributions to UN missions abroad.

For once it would be nice to read an article about Japanese security policy from a mainstream media outlet that acknowledges that Japan is not on a linear trajectory to becoming a "normal" nation, that the lack of a public consensus on security policy is not simply something that will disappear with time; it is a fixture of the landscape that Japanese and US policymakers must acknowledge when considering the future of Japanese security policy.

What's normal?

William Gibson (previously discussed here) gave an interview to the science fiction site io9 recently in which he discussed the politics of his latest book, Spook Country.

One comment in particular caught my eye. Asked about Canada, his adopted home since fleeing the US to escape the draft, he said:

Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it's not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.

This got me thinking about Japan's "normal nation-ists." While Gibson's characterization is a bit too simple — ideology obviously "bled" into the twentieth century, technology had as transformative an impact on the nineteenth as the twentieth — a "normal" nation in the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries is not the same as a normal nation in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.

A normal nation in the late nineteenth century, the salad days of the nation-state, was obsessed with national power, constantly looking to enhance its own power and sizing itself up against other nation-states. It shaped its domestic institutions to enable it to draw on the wealth and bodies of its citizens to build up a modern army and navy and conquered weaker nations for reasons of wealth and honor (and to compete with others, of course). War was the great proving ground of the nation. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote in The Strenuous Life, "If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world."

In their thinking about war and Japanese society in the twenty-first century, Japan's conservatives — the "normal nation-ists" — still see the world through these eyes. To be a normal nation is to compete with other nations, to not "shrink from the hard contests." This is why so many of them want, as Abe Shinzo said, to leave the postwar system behind. In their eyes the postwar system is abnormal, as it led Japan to opt out of the contest for power. It weakened the resolve of the Japanese people for competition internationally. (At least military competition, the only competition that matters; to be a merchant nation, to exert power through money is ignoble, hence the shame of so many Japanese over the country's response to the Gulf crisis in 1990.)

Japan as it exists today is a normal nation. It is peaceful, has abstained from intervention in the internal politics of other countries, and is non-nuclear. It is a signatory to major international treaties and an enthusiastic participant in international regimes. This is normal behavior for a country in the twenty-first century. Japanese, like Europeans, are from Venus (in Robert Kagan's formulation), but Venusian behavior is increasingly normal, even in East Asia, which, despite the persistence of dangerous flashpoints and despite the stirrings of an arms race, is still remarkably peaceful.

Accordingly, the program pushed by the conservatives is the road of an abnormal nation. Perhaps because they take the United States as their model, they assume that US behavior is normal. It isn't. (MTC implies this in this post.) Martial America is almost unique in its adherence to nineteenth-century norms of behavior. American power has played a positive role in supporting international order — there is no denying that. But the motive power behind it is straight out of the nineteenth century, leading to abnormal behavior like the invasion of Iraq. (That the US launched the invasion despite the opposition of much of the world would suggest that the war was "abnormal," i.e. in contravention to a prevailing norm against aggressive, preventive war.)

So it is a misnomer to describe the revisionist advocates of a more robust Japan free of constraints on the use of force as advocates of a normal nation. Prime Minister Fukuda's emphasis on, in MTC's words, "contributing to world security through leadership on disease control, global warming, combatting poverty" looks increasingly like the foreign policy of a normal nation in the twenty-first century. It is also a mistake to describe them as nationalists. Nationalism need not be associated with military power, although nineteenth-century nationalism is. Why can't a twenty-first century nation be proud of more pacific achievements, whether domestic (a society with a low crime rate or high literacy) or international (a commitment to creating a more peaceful, orderly world)? The revisionists do not have a monopoly on pride in their country. Defenders of Japan's postwar system have plenty of which to be proud.

Paradigm shift in the offing?

With political Japan in vacation mode, the decision by the DPJ leadership to oppose extension of the anti-terrorism special measures law continues to cast a shadow over the alliance. Defense Minister Koike's visit to Washington seems to have done little to ease American fears — her speech at CSIS, available online here, seems to contain little more than the usual bromides about US-Japan defense cooperation.

The Abe cabinet's reply to the DPJ maneuver illustrates perhaps the single most important problem in the US-Japan security relationship: there is an utter lack of vision of what the alliance ought to become and what role Japan ought to play in the relationship. For all the intensification of defense cooperation under Koizumi and Abe, it has been remarkably aimless. Defense cooperation to what end? Neither the LDP nor the DPJ (nor the US, for that matter) has a clear vision for Japan's security role, once again undermining the idea that Japan is on a linear track to becoming a more significant security provider.

Take Mr. Ozawa's emphasis on UN approval as a prerequisite for Japanese participation in international coalitions, even in the event of a crisis on the Korean peninsula for example. Some maintain, as noted by Matt Dioguardi, that Ozawa's position on this is consistent. In a broad sense, this is true: Ozawa did emphasize the UN. But it was not necessarily in contradistinction to the US-Japan alliance. This is my summary of Ozawa's position in my master's thesis, based on his Blueprint for a New Japan and the work of the LDP's Ozawa Committee (my apologies for being self-referential):

The basis of Ozawa's 'Japan as a normal nation' position was that Japan could no longer be a 'conscientious objector' in international affairs; the tremendous stake it acquired in international peace and stability as it became an economic power meant that Japan also acquired responsibilities in maintaining peace and stability. Accordingly, preserving international peace and stability had little to do with remilitarizing so as to become a more independent player in the East Asian balance of power or a co-sheriff with the US. The alliance with the US is essential as a framework for cushioning Japan’s return to normalcy, but the focus of Japanese activities should be the UN. He called for the JSDF to be recalibrated for 'peace-building', which meant that it should become a more flexible, technology and knowledge intensive force that can contribute extensively to UN peacekeeping operations (PKO) and other UN-sanctioned missions. He did support a stronger US-Japan alliance, which endeared him to Americans, but as only one part of a Japanese foreign diplomacy that emphasized the UN and cooperation within East Asia.

Is Mr. Ozawa's rejection of the anti-terrorism special measures law consistent with this position? I would argue that the DPJ's position sounds suspiciously like the "conscientious objections" that Mr. Ozawa rejected in the early 1990s. Again, Afghanistan and Iraq are missions of a different color, the latter being a US war with a thin veil of multinational cooperation, the former being a broadly legitimate, multinational project to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to Taliban control and/or general lawlessness and state failure. To reject the Afghanistan mission because it was initially the product of a US war of self-defense is to split hairs for no purpose other than to cock a snook at the US.

In any case, the emphasis on the UN is not a vision for Japanese grand strategy but the absence of one. And given Ozawa's insistence not only on UN approval, but on the mission's being initiated by the UN (as opposed to being initiated by the US, apparently), his formula guarantees Japanese inactivity, at least in all but the most clear-cut cases. It also, in the case of a serious East Asian crisis, gives China (and Russia) veto power over Japan participating in a multinational coalition. Where is the discussion of Japan's national interests? Where is the discussion of what Japan's responsibilities are as a great power? No, defenders of Mr. Ozawa's position are wrong to attribute higher principle to his opposition — other than the principle of a Japan less dependent on the US, as noted by Richard Tanter in this article at Japan Focus.

The government, however, is not blameless. As Nagashima Akihisa, one of the members of Maehara's group, observes at his blog, the DPJ's problem with the Afghanistan mission in the past has been the government's insufficient explanation of what the mission has achieved before calling for votes on previous extension bills. He says that it's "baffling" that the government has not called more attention to the Afghanistan mission's multinational character. And he's right. Defense Minister Koike's rushing to Washington on short notice sends the wrong message to the Japanese people and effectively makes it easier for Mr. Ozawa to present the DPJ's position as a matter of standing up to the US in defense of Japanese interests instead of Japan's shirking its global responsibilities. The Koizumi-Abe line — the road to a "normal" Japan leads through closer alliance cooperation — is as devoid of vision as Mr. Ozawa's emphasis on UN approval. It has resulted in Tokyo's parroting of the Bush administration's rhetoric and photo-op stunts like Prime Minister Abe's visit to the troops in Kuwait in May, which in turn have cleared a path for a popular reaction to closer cooperation with the US rooted in fear of entrapment in American wars.

In short, neither the LDP's nor the DPJ's positions looks at Japanese grand strategy in terms of interests and responsibilities (the ends) and then considers how different means (the US-Japan alliance, the UN, regional fora) help Japan secure those ends. What we have instead is posturing, leaving Japan no closer to a new grand strategy that will enable Japan to defend itself and contribute to regional and global order. So Americans should not overreact to the DPJ's opposition to the Afghanistan mission, and, at the same time, they should be less content with the leadership of Koizumi and Abe, who for all the symbolic measures taken in the past six years, have yet to articulate a clear vision of where Japan and the alliance should be going.

Missing the point on Japan's normalization

Using the occasion of Japanese Air Self-Defense Force pilots participating in live-bombing exercises with the US in the Marianas, Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has a prominently featured article in today's edition (also on the front page, top of the fold of today's IHT) on Japan's shedding "military restraints."

The NYT website also features a short documentary called Rearming Japan.

In general, Onishi's article provides a fair summary of the contours of the debate, taking care to note, for example, that Japan, while ranking high on annual league tables of defense expenditures, has actually been letting its defense budget stagnate over the past decade.

And yet there are a few things that bear noting about this article.

First, Onishi premises the problematic nature of Japanese normalization on its "rattling nerves throughout northeast Asia." And yet the only example Onishi provides to support this is South Korea's recent launching of its first Aegis cruiser and President Roh's comments about an arms race in the region. It seems that if concerns about Japanese normalization are so prevalent, Onishi might have been able to muster a few more examples to show it. (Devin Stewart at Fairer Globalization notes that if Onishi had talked to Southeast Asians, he would have found them more supportive of a more active Japanese security policy.)

Second, and this is a far more substantial problem, Onishi's article and the companion video are lacking in context, both in terms of history and Japanese politics. Regarding the former, Japanese militarism was a product of political developments in Japan occurring at a given moment in history, when colonization and aggression were the hallmarks of great-power status. Just because Japan's ultra-nationalists make this argument does not make it untrue (but it also does not excuse what Japan did). The idea that Japan is going to invade China again, mentioned by one of the interview subjects in the film, is ludicrous and divorced from the facts. With its stagnant defense budget that increasingly emphasizes high-technology air and sea platforms over the GSDF, which according to recent planning documents is set to see its numbers fall, the JSDF may have a hard time helping at the Snow Festival in Hokkaido, let alone invading China.

In terms of the domestic political context, while Onishi gets the change within the LDP right, thanks to an assist from Richard Samuels, he misses the far more significant domestic political change: the ousting of the Socialists from their position as the leading opposition party, the destruction of the Japanese left more generally, and the rise of the Democratic Party of Japan. He quotes DPJ Secretary-General Hatoyama Yukio criticizing the government for violating the constitution in its activities in Iraq, but he misleadingly fails to mention that Hatoyama and his party are less concerned about Japan's playing a more active role than they are concerned about Japan's becoming to close to the US, which they feel has become dangerously aggressive. The DPJ's critique, in general, is not a pacifist one by any means, although former Socialists in its ranks still stand by that position. Rather, the DPJ rejects the argument made by former JDA chief Ishiba Shigeru in this article: "I think the Japan-U.S. security relationship should be as unified as possible, and our different roles need to be made clear."

The DPJ, perhaps because opposition affords it the luxury of taking positions that could be more difficult to adopt in government, has emphasized Japan's need for more independence from the US (I discussed one particularly articulate discussion of this here).

In other words, the debate is far more interesting than Onishi notes — it is by no means simply a matter of pacifists versus nationalists.

This raises the larger question, addressed by Samuels and J. Patrick Boyd in the monograph discussed in this post, of why Japan tied its own hands in security policy in the first place. As they argue convincingly, it was a matter of the political balance within the LDP, with the pragmatic mainstreamers, who favored the Yoshida line, receiving assistance from the political opposition and public opinion in their fight against the LDP's revisionists. But they sought limits not out of pacifism, but because it made good strategic sense. In other words, to adapt a Marxist concept, Japan's postwar pacifism may well have been the superstructure that served as a more presentable face for the substructure, Japan's assessment of its postwar interests as enshrined in the Yoshida doctrine.

With Japan's interests changing as the balance of power in East Asia shifts, it is to be expected that Japan would reconsider its interests in the new era and adjust its grand strategy and defense priorities accordingly. The rise of the nationalist revisionists is one aspect of that, but their rise has been accompanied by the collapse of the left and the emergence of a political opposition that is also interested in seeing Japan's grand strategy change. It may be useful to think of the situation once again as a matter of superstructure and substructure. Today, the superstructure of Japanese normalization is provided by Japan's ultra-nationalists, who never cease cranking out material that leads Japan's neighbors (and ally) to question normalization. The substructure, meanwhile, is once again shaped by a realistic assessments of Japan's interests, threats, and opportunities. Having talked with enough officials in MOFA and the Japanese Ministry of Defense, as well as members of the Diet from both the LDP and the DPJ, it is clear that there are enough important policy makers in Tokyo who don't buy the rhetoric of the ultra-nationalists even as they acknowledge that Japan needs a new doctrine that reflects contemporary realities and may require Japan's acting as a security provider.

In light of these considerations, one has to ask why the NYT thinks this article is so important as to merit page-one coverage.

Is Japan really poised to threaten its neighbors anytime soon, if ever? Is Japan truly ready to follow the US into combat in the "arc of instability" (and refueling in the Indian Ocean, as important a mission as its been, does not count)? Is Japan really even close to possessing even a conventional deterrent in its showdown with North Korea? These are the questions one must keep in mind while reading this article. As unnerving as Japan's ultra-nationalists are, for the moment they are still more of a menace, if that, to the Japanese polity than to Japan's neighbors (see earlier posts on Abe here and here, and Sakurai Yoshiko and the ultra-nationalists more generally here).

Book of the week

This week's book, Japan's Security Strategy in the Post-9/11 World: Embracing a New Realpolitik by Daniel M. Kliman, provides concrete analysis of how Japanese security policy has changed not just in the post-9/11 world as the title suggests, but since the end of the cold war.

Although it is a relatively slim volume, it is packed with useful observations, particularly concerning the role played by the North Korea threat in the process of normalizing Japan's security policy.

Kliman, moreover, further reinforces the idea that the policies resulting from Japan's sensitivity to its international environment — well documented by Kenneth Pyle and Michael Green — have shifted as the region has changed; whereas during the cold war the Yoshida Doctrine's opportunistic pacifism and reliance on the US were a rational response by a broken country at the front lines of cold war, the uncertain post-cold war environment suggests a different set of policies. Steps taken by Abe lend more weight to Kliman's argument.

Abe's id speaks

Well, it was only a matter of time. First, Defense Minister Kyuma signalled in Washington that Japan was approaching a reconsideration of its restrictions on arms exports, prompting Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki to deny that any change was impending and reaffirm the principles. Then, Abe voiced a slightly more ambiguous position, resting somewhere between Kyuma and Shiozaki.

And now, as seems to have been the case throughout the short life of the Abe Cabinet, LDP PARC Chairman Nakagawa Shoichi has put in his two cents on the lifting of the three arms export principles, speaking with less ambiguity than the others on the need to adjust Japan's security norms and institutions for the new era.

Am I wrong to think that Nakagawa, as a party official and not a minister, has acted as Abe's id, saying what Abe wishes he could say, if only he didn't have to be sensitive to public opinion? The best example of this is probably the debate on the debate about nuclear weapons last fall, when Abe refused to censure Nakagawa for his repeated calls for Japan to discuss developing nuclear weapons. Is Abe using Nakagawa as a decoy, testing to see how far his government can push before it runs into implacable opposition?

Whatever the case may be, it seems safe to conclude that the government is opening another front in its campaign to roll back postwar political and legal limits on Japanese security policy. New Komeito has voiced its disapproval once again, but is its discontent with Abe's obsession with overturning the postwar security regime ever going to manifest itself as anything other than public complaints?

Meanwhile, with the government's energy dedicated to challenging longstanding constraints on Japanese security policy, the prospects for further structural reform — the Koizumi revolution — are growing ever dimmer. Why should Abe tackle hard questions about the long-term future of Japanese state and society that would require battling members of the LDP and bureaucracy when he can overturn constraints that have limited Japan's independence in security policy, pleasing the LDP's conservatives in the process?

There is no question that the pursuit of independence is the key to understanding the Abe Cabinet's agenda, enabling Abe to complete the project that proved elusive for his grandfather. Amaki Naoto spells out, sympathetically, this line of thinking in depth in this post. Amaki contrasts Abe with Koizumi, who he feels was content with subservience to the US (he also lambastes Koizumi for his "disgraceful" mimicking of Elvis Presley); Abe, on the other hand, is interested in "independent conservatism," like his grandfather. Amaki spends much of the post elaborating on what sort of US-Japan relationship is consistent with Abe's Gaullism, and he provides an excellent look at the implications of Abe's foreign and security policies.

But the burning question, the question that these "independent conservatives" seem unwilling to answer, is whether any of these changes will make any difference whatsoever if Japan cannot find a way to discover new sources of wealth creation and transform its economy for the post-industrial age.

Shiozaki doth protest too much?

Yesterday I noted that Chief Cabinet Secretary Shiozaki reaffirmed the government's commitment to the three arms export principles, saying that the three principles are "an extremely important policy."

It seems, however, that Abe is leaning more towards Kyuma's position than Shiozaki's, as he said at a press conference at the Kantei yesterday, "It has been decided that henceforth, in conformity with the three principles, we will proceed prudently with an investigation."

I don't think we've heard the last of this issue.

Book of the week

Apologies for not posting a recommended book last week, due to my travels in China.

This week's selection is Fareed Zakaria's From Wealth to Power (Amazon link at right).

Zakaria's book, while in part a theory-laden discussion of the rise of great powers, focuses on how the US went from being an economic giant but a political and military midget in the late nineteenth century. Zakaria takes issue with the standard realist account of the balance of power, suggesting that in the case of the US what mattered in the emergence of the US were decisions taken in Washington in the decades following the civil war that enabled the federal government to exercise the latent power of the continental nation. The state's ability to draw upon the power of the nation forms the basis for what Zakaria calls "state-centered realism."

The implications of this theory for contemporary Japan are obvious. Twenty-first century Japan, in a manner not unlike late nineteenth America, is in the process of making the political decisions that will enable its government to wield national power that it has heretofore been denied.

One significant difference, however, is that Japan is trying to normalize its security policy in a regional environment more akin to Europe in the late nineteenth century, which means that whatever decisions that Abe Cabinet makes regarding Japan's security policy will undoubtedly raise alarms in neighboring capitals. Hence the absurdity of Abe's remarks last week about Japan's needing to keep its neighbors informed about constitution revision. The problem is not a matter of the fairness of Japan's having to genuflect to its neighbors regarding every mooted change to the postwar regime. No, Abe's pronouncement that Japan will explain changes to its neighbors is absurd because changing the constitution will send a clear signal to Japan's neighbors that it will play a more significant, independent role in the regional balance of power, a reality that no amount of "explanation" will be able to obscure.

In any case, Zakaria's book is an excellent corrective to systemic realism and a reminder that in international politics what happens within states is incredibly important (a point that seems obvious to most people but with which some — though, of late, fewer — IR scholars struggle).

Japan's long road to normalization

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff early in the Bush administration, has an op-ed on the occasion of Abe's visit that title of which says it all: "Asia's Overlooked Great Power." (Hat tip: Project Syndicate)

Most of Haass' essay is innocuous, typical proposals about more regional cooperation and a more apologetic stance on the history question, but one point he made strikes me as problematic.

He writes, "Intellectuals, journalists, and politicians are now saying and writing things about Japan’s role in the world that were unthinkable a decade ago. It is a question of when, not if, the Japanese amend Article IX of their constitution, which limits the role of Japan’s armed forces to self-defense."

I don't disagree with the former point. One of the more interesting pieces of Japan's normalization has been the normalization of the security policy debate, with the removal of taboos on what security policies can be considered and an eagerness to discuss the regional and global security environments. But a more robust security debate has not necessarily resulted in -- nor resulted from -- an abiding change how the Japanese people think about their nation's role in the world. While fears of North Korea have enabled the Japanese government to deepen missile defense cooperation with the US, it is unclear the extent to which the abductions issue -- as opposed to direct concerns about North Korea's ballistic missiles and nuclear arsenal -- has shaped Japanese public opinion on North Korea. And beyond North Korea, the Japanese people aren't exactly clamoring for their country to take on more risky missions abroad that could result in combat deaths.

Will this reluctance ultimately give way?

I don't think so. The process of normalization has not been, and will not be, a linear process. It has proceeded with baby steps and the occasional step backwards -- and lots of standing still. While the younger generation of politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has shown itself to be far more willing and eager to see a more robust Japanese global role, they operate in a policy environment in which change happens slowly and in which compromise is a matter of course. And there are a number of politicians who may favor a more prominent Japanese role abroad, but would prefer to be a European-style "soft power" great power. (I suspect that that stance will not be tenable given Japan's highly uncertain regional environment.)

As such, Haass should not be so quick to assume that constitution revision is a foregone conclusion. Given falling support for revision and given that Abe's government may not last the year, Article 9 may live long beyond the sixtieth birthday that it is celebrating this year. I am convinced that re-interpretation is far more likely, but while re-interpretation of the prohibition on the right of collective self-defense would resolve some of the ambiguity surrounding Japan's defense role, especially in the US-Japan alliance, doubts would remain -- and doubts mean that every proposed action (outside of actions requiring immediate response, i.e. a missile launch) will be subject to endless debate in the Diet, parsing whether the proposed mission fits with the new interpretation.

So change is happening, and will continue to happen, but not in the direct, clear-cut, expeditious manner expected by Haass.