Reorienting Japan

Of all the countries to emerge from the wreckage of the Second World War, perhaps none overcame post-war adversity quite as successfully as Japan. By the time the country surrendered in 1945, it was in dire straits. It had lost some 2.8 million people during the war, 3.8% of its 1939 population. Thousands more were so severely maimed or ill that they would never resume productive lives. The once-prosperous Japanese economy was in ruins, and virtually everything the country needed to recover traversed long, vulnerable sea lanes. There were plenty of threats in Japan’s neighbourhood, most notably the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. But Japan could not protect itself by rearming. Its rampages during the 1930s and 1940s, characterised by blood-curdling brutality, had culminated in the conquest of virtually all of East Asia. Not surprisingly, its wary neighbours watched its every move. Moreover, the horrors of the war, especially the atomic bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, convinced the Japanese people that violence must never again be an instrument of statecraft. This was a goal at once noble and sensible. Still, Japan had to confront the world as it was, not as Tokyo wished it to be. At minimum, living in a world in which power is the prime currency required a plan for survival.

Sixty years later, it is evident that Japan, its unenviable starting point notwithstanding, has been extraordinarily successful. It has become an economic powerhouse -- its $4.4 trillion economy is now second only to that of the United States -- fuelled by technological vitality and booming exports. Part of the reason for this achievement is that Japan has been able to remain safe in a dangerous world while spending on average less than 1% of its gross domestic product on soldiers and armaments.

Kenneth Pyle, a historian at the University of Washington, and Richard J. Samuels, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offer superb explanations of Japan’s success in the realm of national security. Their books are marked by erudition, thorough research, sound judgement, clear prose and the absence of arid theories and leaden jargon -- a rare combination in academic writing. Both studies have wide sweep -- especially Pyle’s, which devotes roughly half its pages to the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth -- but neither was written to provide a history of Japan’s international relations. (The bulk of Samuels’s book is devoted to the years following the Second World War.) Both authors are interested primarily in how the end of the Cold War will affect Japan’s national-security strategy. This obliges them to consider the future of Japan’s alliance with the United States in some detail, for while Japan’s leaders managed the challenges they confronted after the Second World War with consummate skill, they could not have done so without the protection of a powerful patron: the United States...

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Books reviewed in this article

Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose, 420pp., Public Affairs.

Richard J. Samuels, Securing Japan: Tokyo's Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia, 277pp., Cornell University Press.