Japans International Democracy Assistance As Soft Power

The term "soft power" describes a country's ability to get what it wants by attracting rather than coercing others. This book analyzes the soft power assets of the United States and Japan, and how they contributed to one of the successful, if unlikely, bilateral relationships of the twentieth century.

Japan has increasingly emphasized democracy assistance since the mid-2000s, such that it now constitutes a major part of Japan’s foreign policy. This approach is an ostensible departure from the country’s traditional foreign policy stance, which tries to avoid bringing values to the forefront of foreign policies. This book intends to answer the questions of why Japan has started emphasizing democracy assistance and why it has relegated itself to a minor role in democracy assistance nevertheless. It argues that Japan’s emphasis on democracy assistance reveals its intention to increase its political influence with regards to China based on democratic values, and its usage of the term "democracy assistance" is a performative speech act to orchestrate a comprehensive approach for international democracy support. Shedding light on the novel aspect of Japanese policy, this book contributes to the understanding of Japanese foreign policy and democracy promotion. Providing the analysis that state’s speech act could cause to create foreign policies that counter what is predicted by structural realism, this analysis makes contributions to neoclassical realism which explains states’ foreign policy choices within the constraints of international structure.

Despite being Asia's most prosperous democracy and one of the world's largest aid providers, Japan has a strikingly low profile in the field of international democracy assistance. Japan directs most of its democracy-related assistance to technocratic top-down governance programming, placing a low emphasis on civil society assistance. The reasons behind this choice stem from Japan's history and its views of development.

Along with the rising importance of democracy assistance, Japan has expanded its foreign aid for it over the two decades. However, not only the share of democracy assistance in Japan's foreign aid overall remains extremely small, but most of Japan's democracy assistance is directed to the state institution sector, while assistance is barely provided to the civil society sector. This dissertation argues that the weak involvement of civil society actors in Japanese democracy assistance causes such characteristics through two intervening variables--information sources and aid human resources. First, weak civil society involvement as information source causes the Japanese government to collect information on aid needs almost exclusively from state actors of recipient countries, which leads Japan to successfully grasp assistance needs on the state level but not on the society level. Such skewness about information on aid needs causes Japan to provide democracy assistance to the state institution sector much more than to the civil society sector. Second, the weak involvement of civil society actors limits human resources mobilized for aid project implementation, which eventually limits the overall amount of Japanese democracy assistance. While democracy assistance in general tends to be provided as technical assistance, which requires a large number of human resources, the amount of human resources among Japanese state actors that can be mobilized for democracy assistance is extremely limited. It is thus potentially by the mobilization of civil society actors that Japan could increase the number of human resources in the field. However, civil society actors' involvement in Japanese democracy assistance is rare. The paucity of human resources as implementation partners of democracy assistance forces Japan to provide democracy assistance in a way need not to secure a large number of implementation partners. This tendency limits the size of each democracy assistance program/project, and makes it difficult for Japan to increase the number of programs/projects.

In international relations today, influence is as essential as military and economic might. Consequently, leaders promote favorable images of the state in order to attract allies and win support for their policies. Jing Sun, an expert on international relations and a former journalist, refers to such soft power campaigns as "charm offensives." Sun focuses on the competition between China and Japan for the allegiance of South Korea, Taiwan, and other states in the region. He finds that, instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all approach, the Chinese and the Japanese deploy customized charm campaigns for each target state, taking into consideration the target's culture, international position, and political values. He then evaluates the effectiveness of individual campaigns from the perspective of the target state, on the basis of public opinion polls, media coverage, and the response from state leaders. A deep, comparative study, Japan and China as Charm Rivalsenriches our understanding of soft power by revealing deliberate image campaign efforts and offering a method for assessing the effectiveness of such charm offensives.

Since the early 1990s, there has been a clear evolution in the military dimension of Japanese diplomacy. From Gulf War I in 1991 to the present day, an incremental but unmistakable acceptance of, and resort to, military dispatches has taken place, and yet crucially, Japan has not morphed into a traditional military power. Exploring Japan’s involvement in both Afghanistan and Iraq, this book examines the evolution and nature of the new civil-military dimension in Japanese foreign policy. It shows how foreign aid, Japan’s traditional non-military diplomatic tool, was merged with the operations of the Japanese Self-Defense Force in Iraq and the activities of NATO-ISAF forces in Afghanistan, and emphasises the centrality of civilian power to Japanese foreign policy and diplomacy. However, Dennis Yasutomo argues that while a new civil-military security culture is replacing the old merchant state culture of pacifism and anti-militarism, Japan does not yet qualify as a military "normal nation". Further, the book’s exploration of the increased utilization of military power within the context of civilian objectives and non-military diplomatic instruments, sheds light on the current build-up of Japanese military power in East and Southeast Asia amid territorial disputes and nuclear threats, and highlights the impact that Japan’s new civil-military diplomacy may have on wider international affairs in the 21st Century. Drawing on interviews with key actors in Tokyo, as well as with practitioners who have served on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book will have broad appeal to students and scholars working on Japanese politics and diplomacy, military and security studies and international relations.

Recommends practical ways in which the United States and Japan can support democratic development in countries that are emerging from autocratic regimes and those that have achieved a measure of democracy, but are in danger of regressing.

An examination of the cultural aspects of U.S.-Japan relations during the postwar Occupation and the early Cold War

Soft power is overlooked in the field of international relations, dismissed as lacking relevance or robustness as a theoretical concept. This book expands upon the idea of ‘soft power’ in international relations and investigates how soft power actually functions by looking at three case studies in Japan-China relations.

East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.