ABSTRACT
Japan’s national security policy and fate have always been closely intertwined in the post-war period with those of the US. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s initiative to regain Japan’s independence from the US-led Occupation by concluding simultaneously the San Francisco Peace Treaty and US–Japan Security Treaty in 1951—in effect forging a strategic bargain of US security guarantees and economic access in return for Japan’s provision of bases and minimal rearmament, often referred to as the “Yoshida Doctrine”—meant that Japan chose Cold War alignment with the US and to “outsource” much of its military security to the new superpower (Samuels 2003, 200–211; Hughes & Fukushima 2003; Hughes 2004). Japan’s policy-makers have thereafter in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods pushed security policy along the essential trajectory of the Yoshida Doctrine and focused on ties with the US, ensuring that as the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) have grown incrementally in their capabilities this has occurred in ways to complement the gradual deepening of US–Japan security cooperation (Soeya 2008, 6–10). The result has been that from the 1980s onwards Japan’s strategic alignment with the US has given way to a more fully formed alliance relationship helping to undergird the dominant US military presence in the Asia-Pacific. At the same time, though, Japan’s policy-makers and citizenry, while acquiescing in the need to rely on superpower sponsorship and capabilities (not least the presence of US Navy, US Air Force and US Marine Corps [USMC] forces and the extended nuclear deterrent) for many aspects of national security, have remained cognizant of the risks of alignment and alliance with the US. Japanese policy-makers have thus employed for much of the post-war period cautious hedging tactics to obviate the “alliance dilemmas” of entrapment in US-led regional or global contingencies that might entail Japan’s own national territory coming under attack or the dispatch of the JSDF on expeditionary warfare, and alternatively abandonment if the US were to choose that other strategic priorities meant that it might not maintain its defensive obligations to Japan under the security treaty (Samuels 2006).
