Takeshi Matsuda opens his study of postwar Japanese-American relations, Voluntary Subordination, by reproducing the title of Charles Beard’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1934: “Written History as an Act of Faith.”[1] It is an intriguing beginning point, not least because of the timing of Beard’s assertion, and its implications. When he spoke at that convention, the future shape of the nation’s institutions in the midst of the Great Depression were anything but certain. But there was a specific challenge to historians: they should see that writing history was not simply a matter of producing a preface to current events, but an act of faith in the future. Beard was, of course, a leader in the “new” history beginning in the Progressive Era, but his encouragement to his fellow historians to see their work as an act of faith implied understanding that the past had a crucial role in shaping the future, and that history was not a story that ended last year, or yesterday. The subtitle of Matsuda’s book thus adds to the sense of obligation he felt in writing Voluntary Subordination with its explanation of his purpose: The Logic and Psychology of the U.S.- Japan Security System.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-32
Takeshi Matsuda. Voluntary Subordination: The Logic and Psychology of the U.S.-Japan Security System. Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 2022. ISBN: 9784863276017 (hardcover, ¥3,800).
8 March 2024 |PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-32 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editors: Masami Kimura and Diane Labrosse
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Lloyd C. Gardner, Rutgers University, Emeritus. 2
Review by Craig Hayden, Marine Corps University. 7
Review by Ayako Kusunoki, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) 12
Response by Takeshi Matsuda, Osaka University and Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. 17
Introduction by Lloyd C. Gardner, Rutgers University, Emeritus
Takeshi Matsuda opens his study of postwar Japanese-American relations, Voluntary Subordination, by reproducing the title of Charles Beard’s presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1934: “Written History as an Act of Faith.”[1] It is an intriguing beginning point, not least because of the timing of Beard’s assertion, and its implications. When he spoke at that convention, the future shape of the nation’s institutions in the midst of the Great Depression were anything but certain. But there was a specific challenge to historians: they should see that writing history was not simply a matter of producing a preface to current events, but an act of faith in the future. Beard was, of course, a leader in the “new” history beginning in the Progressive Era, but his encouragement to his fellow historians to see their work as an act of faith implied understanding that the past had a crucial role in shaping the future, and that history was not a story that ended last year, or yesterday. The subtitle of Matsuda’s book thus adds to the sense of obligation he felt in writing Voluntary Subordination with its explanation of his purpose: The Logic and Psychology of the U.S.- Japan Security System.
I have taken some time to present these points, because Matsuda’s book is not simply a record of postwar Japanese-American relations, as both reviewers note, but because it presents to readers a specific set of issues using the past to establish recommendations for what he sees as a much-needed re-imagination of the bilateral relationship. Matsuda’s interpretation of American foreign policy begins with what he sees as the “Puritan worldview,” with its stringent Calvinist warning “to never let your guard down, not even for a moment” (11). Pearl Harbor, in this view, was the key lesson for the postwar era and thus required, as the book develops at length, the retention of a strong military outpost on Okinawa, which was actually more than an outpost, and more than a military base, as the narrative makes clear. Okinawa thus became a major issue that informs us a great deal about the “logic and psychology” of how Japan fit into the American “global strategy” to build and maintain a “free and open capitalist world order” (12). It also became an issue that threatened that order and those assumptions as a contested matter of great importance to both countries.
Without the rising tensions that became the Cold War in almost a matter of months after the Japanese surrender, the Okinawa question might not have become such a long and difficult matter to resolve. From the beginning of the Korean War (and perhaps even as a peripheral cause of the war) American perceptions of the need for such a base that was capable of servicing heavy bombers with atomic “payloads” was deemed essential to preserving that world order. And after Korea there was Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam. Matsuda offers a telling vignette about President Richard Nixon’s view as recorded in a conversation with British Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1971. The peoples of Germany and Japan, he told the prime minister, were tormented by memories of defeat. Japan was forbidden to possess nuclear weapons. The US had an obligation to see, therefore, that Japan did not lose faith in the “nuclear umbrella” for two reasons, fear of the Soviet Union and Communist China, but also because it would chart its own course outside the American free world order. “Japan is the primary reason for the US to continue its involvement in Vietnam” he said. But it was not merely a military question since “the Japanese are all over Asia like a bunch of lice” (48).
There are many racist statements about the Japanese in American documents, but Nixon’s comment also has to do with things said by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the early days of the Vietnam War, most especially the famous “domino” press conference answer to a question about Vietnam, and the supposed consequences of losing the country to Communism. He argued that “it takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go—that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.” He added that the “possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.”[2]
Those were the supposed stakes in matters like the return of Okinawa to Japanese rule. But from the Japanese standpoint, while protective issues from attack might be something to think about, the real questions had to do with self-determination, and that was where “voluntary subordination” became the pressing matter to be resolved. After years of tensions between the countries with peaks and valleys, intense negotiations led to a reversion agreement on 17 June 1971, which stipulated payments totaling $320 million from Japan for the assets associated with the military base—including $50 million for the transfer of nuclear weapons from the island! In addition, there were undisclosed payments to the United States of $190 million, bringing the total to $510 million. Finally, the agreement contained provisions that would allow the United States to use the Okinawa military base in case of an emergency (196-197). At the time approached for the revision to become effective, the President and Japanese Prime Minister Sato expressed their hopes for a cultural exchange program that the Japanese were considering establishing. Matsuda considers the reversion agreement a success that eliminated a major source of difficulties in the bilateral relations between the countries, even though in the end it expanded the American military’s ability to use the base in worldwide conflicts.
One might label the revision agreement a model for voluntary subordination negotiations. Matsuda outlines that as Nixon was discussing Okinawa with Japanese policymakers, moreover, was planning to take the United States off the gold standard in an effort to meet balance of payments difficulties—a decision that was taken without consultation with the Japanese and that offered a new challenge to the Japanese economy. By this time, however, the fear that Japan would be cut off from Vietnam as well as the Chinese market had disappeared. Ten years after the Japanese-American peace treaty that had largely been negotiated by John Foster Dulles came into force, the Japanese economy was booming. Another unilateral move, Nixon’s secret diplomacy that led to the end of America’s effort to isolate the Chinese, without consulting Tokyo, led to the impression by many Japanese that the United States “was a selfish and egocentric country” (192) that would develop a new policy leaving their country behind, and making the Okinawa reversion agreement even more one-sided, as the United States could do what it pleased, when it pleased, in traditional imperialist fashion.
All of which brings us to the second major question developed in Matsuda’s book, the matter of cultural relations and exchanges. From the beginning of the book, we are given a fine discussion of how American expansion worked in contrast to the two styles of European imperialism: settler imperialism and outpost imperialism. From the time of the War of 1898 the United States had adopted a policy first in the Philippines of transferring wholesale American political institutions, even as it continued to entertain and practice, as Matsuda points out, racist beliefs, overtly, and covertly, as for instance in Nixon’s dualistic comment about the need to protect Japan as a reason for American involvement in Vietnam, while also casually asserting that the Japanese were all over Asia “like a bunch of lice.” Policy toward Japan after World War II was no different. The United States wished to imbue the Japanese with institutions that would produce a non-Communist form of modernization. All this was in accordance with a new type of “imperial” expansion, I would argue, that Matsuda has used in fashioning his interpretation of the difficult phrase, “voluntary subordination.”
The real turning point in occupation policy, and post-peace treaty affairs, Matsuda argues, came with the appointment of Edwin O. Reischauer as ambassador by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The new ambassador worked assiduously to improve cultural relations with Japan, which he views as essential to the political success of American foreign policy. The Fulbright-Hays Act later that year, aimed at improving cultural exchanges—and especially concerned with presenting American life and institutions in a favorable situation—as well as the bilateral Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON) followed his appointment. These efforts led to a very successful era and overall improvement in Japanese-American relations, which were cemented in the mid-1960s by full Japanese economic recovery from the war. And now there were several institutes of American Studies in Japanese universities contributing to better understanding between the two nations.
Matsuda points out that a major reason for the success of these efforts was that they were not conditioned upon a one-sided agreement, in the sense that Japanese scholars in the United States were exposed to the growing opposition to the Vietnam War, and the new interpretations of the history of American foreign relations, most especially at the University of Wisconsin in that era. One Japanese scholar who studied at Wisconsin, Tomohisa Shimizu, for example, became an important figure in American Studies in Japan, and at the CULCON conference, in which he assisted in the preparation of a report on that meeting (170). Ironically, Reischauer suffered a loss of confidence in Japan as a result of the new independence in a willingness to criticize American policy when he expressed his belief that the Japanese press was not “balanced” in its coverage of the Vietnam “problem.” (180). He was replaced by a professional diplomat.
Matsuda ends his book with a frank conclusion. The reality of the relationship remains that Japan has become “overly dependent on the U.S. even from a psychological standpoint” (207), a situation that impedes the development of healthy bilateral relations between the two nations. What remedies might there be? Matsuda argues that it becomes necessary for all Japanese, especially those he identifies as having a great interest in international issues—what he calls the “attentive public”—to “communicate our views to citizens living in various parts of the U.S., and thus convey the real voice of the Japanese people” (208). He believes that there exist several avenues by which these exchanges can take place that will help to transform the relationship to a more equal one. “At the beginning of this book, I quoted Charles A. Beard, who [wrote], ‘Written History as an Act of Faith’ and although I would not dream of comparing my work to Beard’s tome, it is no exaggeration to say that this book is my own personal act of faith” (212).
As readers of this introduction may have concluded, Professor Matsuda’s new book does not fit into traditional categories usually termed Diplomatic History or IR (International Relations). Our reviewers agree. In one sense, suggests Ayako Kusunoki, the book might seem old-fashioned. But that is not really the case, as the title suggests, for it is about the psychology inherent in the postwar relationship as much as the politics. “The yoking of the seemingly contradictory concepts of servitude,” this reviewer writes, “with the voluntary is a skillful way to capture this complex situation.” While there might be ambivalent feelings about the relationship, particularly about the US role as the world’s policeman, in general the population does not dislike the country and supports the alliance. But does the book succeed “In explaining postwar US-Japan relations” in a way the title Voluntary Subordination proposes?
Kusunoki then suggests there are three issues to consider. First, it is difficult to prove or disprove the notion of “voluntary,” given the settlement of the Okinawa base issue and that of the use of bases in Japan. Therefore, “it must be asked to what extent these concepts are effective in explaining the US-Japan relationship.” Second, given the situation that developed quickly after World War II, in what sense was the US relationship with Japan any different from that of other countries in the American alliance system. Were there any special factors “that made Japanese and/or American behavior unique, if voluntary subordination is a phenomenon found only in US-Japanese relations”? Finally, is it correct to apply such a term to the years when American hegemony began to thin out—most particularly in world economics? She writes that “together with the relative decline of the United States Japan increased its international presence as it became the third largest economy after the United States and the Soviet Union in 1968.” As that happened, moreover, new global issues arose, including especially questions about sustainable supplies of energy, the global North-South divide, and stagflation. “The fundamental change in the environment surrounding the US-Japan relationship must have influenced its basic structure,” she argues.
In addition to these issues, Kusunoki suggests despite unilateral American actions in the 1970s in regard to the gold standard and the recognition of Communist China, the fundamental questions of the late-Cold War world deepened cooperation between the countries. She asks, “how would a bilateral relationship pursuing common interests and universal values feature in the author’s conceptualization?” Despite these questions, however, Kusunoki, fully agrees that the author’s belief in the importance of promoting a broad range of personal interactions and cultural exchanges is as important as it always was in promoting Japanese-American understanding.
Craig Hayden suggests that the growing tensions between China and the United States will form the backdrop for all Asian questions, not least the Japanese-American relationship. In this situation, it will be important to consider the issue of whether, as Matsuda argues, the relationship is based primarily on the factors in the postwar, Cold War, environment, or have evolved “from a dependency that is more deeply rooted in the balance of power within Japanese society to direct the course of Japan’s foreign relations.” He also writes that Matsuda’s book is a nuanced look at that question, because, as our Kusunoki suggests, it straddles debates within the field of international relations. Using the “bandwagon” analogy, Hayden asks if the concepts involved with voluntary subordination really fit that scenario. Put another way, the book argues the history of the relationship since World War II “reflects the political configurations of interests within Japan to shape the course of its foreign policy, from conservative policy elites to intellectuals and thought leaders.” As such it became important to design a policy that overcame the bitterness of the war and its aftermath. To secure all the things it needed, including basing rights and economic ties, American policymakers could not rely solely on “the pragmatism of Japanese policy elites.” The United States would have to “cultivate its own legitimacy and credibility with both the Japanese government and the public.”
Hayden discusses Matsuda’s emphasis on cultural exchanges as crucial to the success of United States’ efforts to manage all the questions that arose around the settlement of the Okinawa revision and basing issues. Indeed, the very heart of the book and Ambassador Reischauer’s great successes consisted of “internationalizing” the consciousness of the Japanese people, and initiative which worked admirably to promote American policy objectives, and were, therefore, a kind of proof of the slippery concept of voluntary subordination. The term also admits, however, that the relationship is not a static one, and there exist various methods outlined by the author in which the relationship can develop in the direction of equality, methods which will involve serious thinking in both Japan and the United States especially in what he calls the “attentive public.”
Matsuda’s lengthy response to the reviewers is practically an addendum to his book in terms especially of new and useful material for students of the Japanese-American relationship. One can only urge that readers of this roundtable give it the attention it deserves as a penetrating analysis of how that relationship developed.
Contributors:
Takeshi Matsuda began his scholarship with American history and American diplomatic history as parts of American Studies in 1967. He has studied and taught in the United States, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his PhD in 1979, and the University of Maryland at College Park in 1985. His publications include Soft Power and Its Perils (Stanford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2007) and The Origins of Japan’s Dependency on the United States: U.S. Soft Power Strategy (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015). As a visiting Fulbright professor, he taught modern Japanese history at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1986 and was awarded Hidalgo de San Antonio de Bexar by the City of San Antonio. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Osaka University and Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. He continues to study American history, keeping in mind the motto that “History without interpretation becomes mere chronicle. And interpretive history involves the marriage of hypothesis and factual evidence in the way that science combines hypothesis with experimental evidence.”
Lloyd C. Gardner is Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University. A Wisconsin PhD, he is the author or editor of more than fifteen books on American foreign policy, including Safe for Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1984), Approaching Vietnam (W.W. Norton, 1988), Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam (Ivan R. Dee, 1995), and The War on Leakers (The New Press, 2016). He has been president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Affairs
Craig Hayden (PhD, University of Southern California) is Associate Professor of Strategic Studies at the Marine Corps University. From 2015–2018, he served as Coordinator for the Diplomatic Mastery Program at the Department of State, Foreign Service Institute. Hayden’s writing focuses on strategic communication, soft power, and the role of technology in diplomacy. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Soft Power: Public Diplomacy in Global Contexts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). He has published articles in journals such as the International Journal of Communication and in edited volumes such as the Handbook of Communication and Security, ed. Bryan C. Taylor and Hamilton Bean (New York: Routledge, 2019).
Ayako Kusunoki is Professor of International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto, Japan. She received a doctoral degree in political science at the Graduate School of Law, Kobe University. She studies political and diplomatic history of modern Japan mainly in the period between the 1950s and 1970s, and published several works on Japan’s security policy including Yoshida Shigeru to Anzen Hoshō Seisaku no Keisei: Nichibei no Anzen Hoshō Kōsō to sono Sōgo Sayō, 1943–1952 [Yoshida Shigeru and the Making of Japan’s Postwar Security Policy: The Interaction of Ideas for Peace and Stability between the United States and Japan, 1943-1952] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2009) and “Tasū Kōwa to Kandai na Kōwa: Nihon no Kōsō to Sentaku [Japan’s Policy and Decision on the Peace Treaty],” in San Francisco Kōwa to Higashi Ajia [The San Francisco Peace Treaty and East Asia], ed. Shin Kawashima and Yūichi Hosoya (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 2022).
Review by Craig Hayden, Marine Corps University
Growing tensions between the United States and China will likely force a reckoning for Asian regional powers.[3] These countries must inevitably consider the consequences of their strategic alignment, as relations between the United States and China are increasingly strained across domains of competition. Japan, which has long hitched its fortunes to the security umbrella of the United States, may yet find itself drawn into a larger conflict that is largely outside of its own ability to manage or control, with potentially dire implications for its sovereignty.[4] In both policy rhetoric and action, relations between China and the United States are taking on the trappings of a new Cold War.[5] This historical pivot is a crucial context for the timely arguments laid out in Takeshi Matsuda’s Voluntary Subordination: The Logic and Psychology of the U.S.-Japan Security System. Matsuda’s historical reading of US-Japan foreign relations across key security treaties and diplomatic episodes after World War II represents a thought-provoking assessment of how diplomacy intersects with domestic politics, which for Matsuda reveal persistent, driving forces that weigh on the foreign policy decisionmaking of both countries.
The historical moments presented in this volume elaborate asymmetries of power between the United States and Japan, yet also raise significant questions for Japanese foreign-policy stakeholders. Ultimately, Matsuda invites the question of whether or not the determinants of Japanese foreign policy derive from structural explanations, such as the preponderance of American power in the wake of World War II to dictate the terms of security arrangements, or from a dependency that is more deeply rooted in the balance of power within Japanese society to direct the course of Japan’s foreign relations. Matsuda’s book offers a nuanced portrayal of the social and cultural terrain of diplomacy.
On the surface, this question straddles mainstream debates within the field of International Relations over what determines state interests and actions. Broadly defined realist perspectives could frame the development of US-Japan relations as one which is derived from Japan’s pragmatic approach to seeking protection under a US security umbrella.[6] In this view, the subordinate position in which Japan finds itself across the security treaties discussed in the book is a consequence of an asymmetry of power; Japan has little choice but to bandwagon with the United States.[7] Matsuda’s narrative of US-Japan relations, however, is clearly more nuanced than this account. While Matsuda acknowledges the influence of US material power, through its military presence and the economic ties of the two countries, the book offers a historical narrative that suggests that the path dependency of relations between the two countries was not inevitable. Rather, this history reveals that Japan’s relationship with the United States reflects the political configuration of interests within Japan to shape the course of its foreign policy, from conservative policy elites to intellectuals and thought leaders, and the viability of what Matsuda calls the “attentive public.” (20).
This analytical move raises more questions than can readily be answered in a single volume. Matsuda’s main argument claims that Japanese security strategy is not simply a by-product of American dominance, but that it developed in key moments of acquiescence among different stakeholders in Japanese foreign policy. Put differently, the implicit argument recasts foreign policy formulation as a reflection of society, where what constitutes the public sphere can shape the collective understanding about the requirements of national security and future policy. Japan’s acquiescence to US strategy for basing rights, for example, is a question of making such subordination legitimate across society, when other strategic options, such as a more assertive strategic autonomy, could be pursued. The domestic determinants of foreign policy and national security strategy rest on a tacit soft power context—where policy legitimacy is contested ground, informed by elites, cultural relations, and the viability of debate among policy stakeholders outside of government. Matsuda’s framing of diplomatic history relies heavily on the role of this public dimension. But this is not only a question of theory, but also one which is derived from a reading of historical documents that highlights the centrality of cultural relations in diplomatic strategy discussed in the book. According to Matsuda, policymakers in the United States feared that Japan, with simmering anti-US views, would gravitate toward other security and economic patrons during the Cold War. To secure US interests such as basing rights and economic ties, it could not rely solely on the pragmatism of Japanese policy elites. The United States would have to cultivate its own legitimacy and credibility with both the Japanese government and the public.
Voluntary Subordination can certainly be read as a series of demonstrative cases where the consequences of World War II’s aftermath shaped the disparity of agency between the two countries. The structural and material determinants of power are visible in how the United States dictated the terms of the relationship with Japan during and after the occupation, through to the reversion of Okinawa and the entrenchment of US basing rights throughout Japan. The volume does not, however, presume a reductive view of Japan as a foreign policy actor, but rather embraces the messy politics of foreign policy decisionmaking as the product of differing domestic interests, hierarchy, culture, and ultimately, how the Japanese public sphere confronted the obligations of debating a future course for national security with the United States.
The book mounts a sustained critique of Japanese foreign policy as a reflection of society and culture, although not just a consequence of elite capture. In this regard, Matsuda’s book reveals the imprint of US influence by examining moments around which the possibility for policy critique in Japan are met with efforts to shape public discourse. Matsuda takes on the Gramscian wager that Japanese foreign policy is a reflection of Japanese public argument and controversy—where competing domestic interests operate within the hegemonic influence of the United States in shaping (and likely distorting) policy thinking.[8] Matsuda sketches repeated instances of foreign policy argumentation that foreclosed alternatives to strategic relationship with the United States. Even with the diplomatic language of “equal partnership”—the United States and its advocates within Japanese policy decision-making continue to dominate the relationship (112-117).
This is not to suggest that Matsuda is “blaming” the United States, per se, in actively seeking to shape diplomatic outcomes in ways that benefit the United States, often at the expense of Japan’s agency and indeed, sovereignty. Matsuda acknowledges that despite the predispositions of US leaders to root their foreign policy moves in a position of a moral high ground, they tend to conduct diplomacy more explicitly in the interest of the United States. The problem, at least for Matsuda, was the ability of Japanese leaders to reclaim agency through subsequent security agreements and the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese control.
Ultimately, this book settles on the questions of who gets to determine Japanese national interests, who gets to participate, and what are the critical implications of who gets to decide foreign policy (whose interests are served). In this regard, the book functions better as a study of the determinants of foreign policy than as a case study for a structural vision of international relations. The book frames the postwar history of diplomatic relations in ways that foreground the foundational role of culture and soft power. It is an implicit soft power case, because it highlights public diplomacy as a contested field in the relationship, where both Japan and the United States sought to shape the contours of public debate over foreign policy. In this regard, the book presents, implicitly if not always explicitly, the role of reputational security, legitimacy, and credibility in the history of Japan’s “voluntary subordination” to the United States through successive diplomatic agreements. The book’s attention to the US-Japan Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON) initiative—where the United States and Japan assessed their efforts at cultural diplomacy and charted necessary strategy for public engagement—is a fulcrum for the main argument that “voluntary subordination” was cultivated as much within the management of Japanese public discourse as it was a symptom of power asymmetry.[9]
The historical narrative is nuanced in ways that do not always draw clear linkages between “politics, culture, ideology, and values” (iii). Matsuda positions this study as one that examines the intersection of “domestic politics” with “international politics and diplomacy” (5), presenting in parallel the impact of cultural history on US foreign policy with the stakeholders of Japanese foreign policy being intertwined and driving forces. It is less clear, however, that the book’s depiction of US culture and history supports Matsuda’s argument, and in some ways, the comparison detracts from his more incisive critique of Japanese domestic politics. Because the US diplomatic actions are ultimately reduced to a distillation of pragmatic interests and, in some cases, the US misreading of Japanese public sentiment, the sections on US history may be less useful to the core argument of the book.
The book presents a three-actor model—the United States, the forces of conservatism in Japan, and the attentive Japanese public—as crucial to the formulation of Japanese foreign policy over time. Theoretical arguments are loaded into assumptions about the role of the attentive public in Japanese politics and the role they should play in policy discourse. The book reaches a remarkably candid and biting assessment, and deficiencies of the public sphere are starkly portrayed. As Matsuda argues, Japanese intellectuals, though they have borrowed the concept of “freedom” from the West, have not engaged in the freedom to critique or question the US-Japan relationship. Rather, Matsuda laments the capacity of intellectuals to “face down the wall of authority” (85). As he concludes, freedom is a responsibility, which, when not seized, erodes Japanese sovereignty. Matsuda does not so much criticize a lack of opposition to US interests as note the lack of robust debate over critical alternatives to US domination.
Matsuda’s portrayal of Japan’s elites, which separates the pragmatism of conservatives accommodating US interests from intellectuals captured by government interests and those who might question the US relationship, diagnoses a hesitancy to advocate for stepping outside the US security umbrella. But here, the inability of Japan to constructively resist dependency on the United States is not just a deficiency of the public sphere for foreign policy. Matsuda builds the case that the implications of the 1951 US-Japan Security Treaty and its political and economic consequences are manifest in society itself in ways that limit the potential for Japanese agency. In other words, Japan’s economic and political dependency on the United States yielded social and cultural impacts that reinforced acquiescence. The totality of Japanese postwar culture, through media, civic life, and education, serves to indoctrinate Japanese publics in ways that foreclose options to question the terms of the treaty. Put differently, Matsuda lays the groundwork for the provocative claim that subordination to the United States is encoded into the society and politics of Japan, in part because of the economic and security dependencies that are reinforced in diplomatic relations. The security treaty was an “arrangement for domination through passive acquiescence” (84).
The book charts the US efforts to use cultural diplomacy to manage the legitimacy of this relationship. Matsuda’s historical narrative depicts US policymakers and diplomats as seeking to sustain Japanese economic and security dependence on the United States over time. The work of US Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer to engage in cultural diplomacy is instructive in advancing Matsuda’s thesis.[10] Reischauer’s challenge of securing voluntary agreements that would ultimately benefit US interests required diplomatic engagement to legitimize such a relationship among key Japanese intellectuals and the public. In this way, foreign policy was enacted through public diplomacy, through programs to “internationalize the consciousness of the Japanese people” (113). The book presents the establishment of CULCON and the Fulbright program as pivotal, signaling the necessity of engagement with the Japanese public and intellectual stakeholders in Japanese politics. In stark terms, these instruments of public diplomacy are an exercise of soft power, to build the social capital, attraction, and legitimacy to sustain the bilateral relationship through mutual understanding and connection with the Japanese public (139).
The historical episodes reviewed in the book point to a diagnosis of Japan’s eroding strategic autonomy. While Matsuda’s reading of historical materials reveals the strategic intent of US actors to maintain Japan’s dependence on the United States (204), he also offers a domestic critique, going so far as to say that Japan’s political discourse suggests that its leaders are “ambivalent about Japan being a sovereign nation” (205). Matsuda’s narrative suggests that Japan is still living through the consequences of its early acquiescence. It is a welcome reminder that there is a long shadow for the economic and security implications of diplomatic agreements. The social and political consequences of alliance politics, witnessed in strategic entanglement over time, efface both clear boundaries for domestic interests and, at some level, the image of Japanese sovereignty. Matsuda argues that this is an intentional by-product of internationalization.
However, Matsuda’s history offers the possibility of a more balanced relationship, where the “attentive public” should not be beholden to the gatekeeping of Japanese foreign policy elites. Matsuda does not entertain this as a theoretical proposition about the role of publics in foreign policy. Rather, he shows how leaders from the United States took Japanese publics seriously in their strategic calculations as demonstrated in their diplomatic engagement. Publics matter to the durability of diplomatic agreements.
In sum, the book offers a number of insights in ways that can generate new lines of inquiry and provide value to different disciplinary studies of US-Japan relations, diplomacy, and international affairs. It provides the uninitiated with a helpful introduction to a sequence of diplomatic events: the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States of America (1951; 1960), the Kennedy-Ikeda Communique (1961), and the Okinawa Reversion Agreement (1971). It also, importantly, highlights CULCON and the efforts by US Ambassador Reischauer in the 1960s, which demonstrate the perceived strategic significance of education and cultural relations to securing the relationship between the two countries. Matsuda’s work provides a compelling case for the visibility of soft power concepts in the actual conduct of statecraft and in the strategic formulations in the diplomatic record. This history also provides a counterweight to structuralist arguments about state interests and explanations of US-Japan relations by surfacing the role played by social and political forces in national security commitments. Finally, it also serves as form of public critique, laying down a challenge for scholars in Japan and elsewhere to interrogate their role in shaping the discourse of relations between the two countries.
Review by Ayako Kusunoki, International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken)
Concepts, or general laws that lead to a coherent interpretation of history, always attract people. Their invocation allows meaning to be ascribed to various everyday events, which enable people to feel as if they can see the organic linkages between political, economic, social, and cultural phenomena, and comprehend the structure of the world in which they live. “Voluntary subordination,” the key concept introduced by this study, stems from the author’s belief that “it would be desirable to have a research paper or book that pays full attention to all aspects of military, economic, and cultural affairs, and depicts the entire picture of US-Japan relations from a global perspective and in the context of a long history” (6-7). With this catchy expression—the original Japanese, reijū, sounds more lurid, implying that Japan is a kind of slave to the United States—Takeshi Matsuda attempts to unravel the fundamental logic and psychology of the US-Japan alliance.
There is no doubt many Japanese have the impression that, ever since the Asia-Pacific War, Japan has been at the mercy of the United States in its decisionmaking.[11] Opposition parties and the mass media have made a pattern of criticizing the foreign policy of the Liberal Democratic (LDP)-led government as diplomatically subservient to the US government or as demonstrating the absence of independent diplomacy. In academia, the dichotomous framework of independence from, or subordination to, the United States has been the method frequently adopted by political and diplomatic histories in describing post-war US-Japan relations. Some scholars critically examine the policy decisions on peace and security made by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru around 1950 as the origin of “subordination,”[12] and others focus on various issues related to US military bases in Japan and try to figure out the structural inequality of US-Japan relations.[13] In the field of Japanese studies in the United States, John W. Dower’s classic works, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954, and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II, have had an often overwhelming influence.[14] While more recent publications tend to stress that Japan internalized liberal-democratic values since the Occupation period,[15] these studies are based on the premise that the United States, as the superpower, provides Japan with its interests and universal values, while the latter is a faithful follower and recipient.
By contrast, using International Relations (IR) theory to explain Japan’s post-war foreign policy, constrained as it is by Article 9 of the Constitution, has long been a challenge in IR. Many works have sought to develop a theoretical framework through which to better understand the foreign policy of post-war and post-Cold War Japan.[16] The primary interest of these studies, though, has been to examine the applicability of existing IR theories, in particular realism or constructivism, rather than the question of whether Japan has been independent from or subordinate to the United States. Furthermore, against the backdrop of the enhancement of the US-Japan alliance over the last twenty years, more research is being conducted in Japan on the development of the bilateral security relationship since the Cold War, focusing on the transformation of the two countries’ military “cooperation” at various levels. Such works analyze Japan’s expanding role in the alliance as part of the power game in the Asia-Pacific region, rather than from the perspective of independence or subordination.[17]
Considering these achievements in IR and diplomatic history, to approach the US-Japan alliance from the perspective of the “dominant-subordinate” relationships may seem somewhat old-fashioned. This is not to deny the subordinate nature of postwar Japan’s foreign policy: there are plenty of examples of Japan being forced to acquiesce to the US demands in the Cold War period. One may point to the Eisenhower administration’s pressure on Japan not to make concessions on territorial issues to the Soviet Union during the peace negotiation in the mid-1950s, in case Japan would be drawn into the Communist camp. Likewise, Japan was unable to establish diplomatic relations with the Chinese Communist regime until the US government normalized its relations with the country in the early 1970s. It was almost impossible for Japan to challenge US Cold War priorities. In exchange for the peace and prosperity provided by United States hegemony, Japan was unable to adopt measures that would be detrimental to the United States in its confrontation with Communist China and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, while these examples are well known, what do they tell us about the relationship itself?
As the author points out, individual empirical studies are not able to provide a complete picture of the power asymmetries that he understands as structuring post-war US-Japan relations. This book’s principle contribution is in emphasizing the “voluntary” nature of Japan’s subordination: “Japan would not only provide bases to the US but also allow the US to use them freely, and […] in return for Japan’s cooperation with the US in its fight against communism in the diplomatic sphere, the US would provide Japan with protection under the nuclear umbrella and US troops in addition to guaranteeing a stable economic existence for the Japanese people” (77). This occurred because the US government took advantage of “Japan’s vulnerability, i.e., Japan’s dependence on the U.S.,” to “keep Japan in the liberal camp and to ‘control Japan’s freedom of action and keep Japan under U.S. control,’” while asking for the Japanese government’s “voluntary cooperation with the U.S. in turn” (77-79). While there are ambivalent feelings among many Japanese people who are critical of the United States as the “world’s policeman,” and of Japan’s “subordination” to the United States, in general Japanese do not dislike the country, and support the US-Japan alliance. The yoking of the seemingly contradictory concepts of servitude with the voluntary is a skillful way to capture this complex situation.
This book consists of three parts. Part I provides an overview of US-Japan relations and American history, with chapter 1 outlining the basic nature of the bilateral relationship and introducing the main actors. The subsequent two chapters explicate American culture and ideology, which are deep-rooted in its history, as important drivers of the voluntary subordination/servitude concept. In Part II, the author describes over two chapters how Japan’s voluntary subordination to the United States was formed in the 1950s, over a decade-long period that was bookended by the Allied peace with Japan and the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1960. Chapter 4 examines the conclusion of the Peace and Security Treaties, particularly focusing on the US insistence on base rights in mainland Japan and Okinawa, while chapter 5 reviews major political, social, and cultural events to detail the significance of the 1950s for both countries. It is in the 1960s, Matsuda argues, the period covered by Part III, that a bilateral relationship based on Japan’s voluntary servitude to the United States was “embraced” by Japan. The author examines the role of Ambassador Edwin O. Reischauer (chapter 6), the Japan-United States Conference on Cultural and Educational Interchange (CULCON), which was established at the Ikeda-Kennedy talks in June 1961 (chapter 7), negotiations over the Government Appropriation for Relief in Occupied Area (GARIOA)-Economic Rehabilitation in Occupied Area Fund (EROA) repayment problem (chapter 8), and the reversion of Okinawa (chapter 9), all of which cemented Japan’s voluntary subordination to the United States.
Matsuda emphasizes the significance of the reversion of Okinawa to the US use of military bases, and concludes with his suggestion for promoting the “humanization of U.S.-Japan relations” (199-214). Based on his familiarity with American history and culture, he illuminates the intellectual and cultural exchanges that occurred as part of diplomatic relations between two countries, in particular through the development of CULCON. It is notable that he examines negotiations over the repayment of GARIOA-EROA through the lens of US-Japan cultural exchanges. Despite its importance in bilateral governmental talks throughout the 1950s, this problem has rarely been dealt with in diplomatic histories, which have often underestimated the fact that the US-Japan alliance is not just the military cooperation between the two countries. As this study successfully demonstrates, it is a multi-layered relationship grounded in interpersonal contacts and relations.
As the organizing concept for this study, voluntary servitude/subordination, should be evaluated by whether it succeeds in explaining postwar US-Japan relations. In this regard, three issues struck this reviewer.
The Falsifiability of the Concept
The author demonstrates that “the U.S. government’s basic policy toward Japan was to keep Japan in the liberal camp and to ‘control Japan’s freedom of action and keep Japan under U.S. control.’ As a tactic, it focused on Japan’s vulnerability, i.e., Japan’s dependence on the U.S.” (77). In bilateral relations, the dependence of one country militarily and economically on another might entail subordination. Yet did the US government think that Japan’s economic dependence on the United States was desirable? Both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations stressed as major policy goals the development of a self-supporting Japanese economy with lesser dependence on the United States through aid or special procurement.[18] In addition, it is not necessarily clear what the “free use of bases” (187) that the author repeatedly emphasizes means. Legally, under the 1960 US-Japan Security Treaty and related agreements, the United States has no right to freely use military bases in Japan. The Joint Statement by Prime Minister Sato Eisaku and President Richard M. Nixon in November 1969 indicated that in the event of an emergency on the Korean Peninsula or in the Taiwan Strait, Japan would respond in the affirmative to prior consultations with the United States over the deployment of US forces in Japan. However, this is not synonymous with Japan’s waiving its right to refuse the use of military bases in Japan.
One could argue that incorporating Japan into the US-led international economic and financial system made Japan’s economic dependence on the United States inevitable, or that prior agreement is tantamount to allowing the free use of military bases by the US forces. As such, as long as the Japanese government acted in a manner consistent with the intentions and interests of the US government, Japan may be considered to have “voluntarily cooperated” with, or be in a state of “voluntarily servitude” to, the United States. Given that it is rather difficult to prove, as well as impossible to falsify completely, the voluntary nature of Japanese subordination, it must be asked to what extent these concepts are effective in explaining the US-Japan relationship.
The Applicability of the Concept to Cases other than US-Japan Relations
All sovereign nations pursue their own interests in international relations. It is no surprise that the United States considers its own national interests when deciding on policy, whether towards Japan or any other country. Moreover, the basic characteristics of US foreign policy, which chapters 2 and 3 elaborate are rooted in US history and culture, do not manifest themselves only in US-Japan relations. Likewise, it was difficult for any nation of the Western nations to overtly defy the United States; efforts to do so came with considerable costs. In the postwar period, the bipolar world system, the Cold War, and the alliance networks constrained the foreign policy options of all countries. Japan was no exceptional in this regard.
Referring to Edwin O. Reischauer’s article, Matsuda cites two Japanese proverbs, “yoraba taiju no kage (find shelter in the shade of the big tree)” and “nagai mono ni wa makareyo (if you can’t beat them, join them),” as expressions of Japan’s “tendency to seek support from influential patrons” (80), suggesting that they describe Japan’s behavior as a sovereign nation. In international relations, however, Japan’s dependence for its security on the United States can be explained as bandwagoning, one of the options available to a state when it enters into an alliance, based on a calculus of its own benefits and costs.[19] It is necessary to show the factors that made Japanese and/or American behavior unique, if voluntary subordination is a phenomenon found only in US-Japan relations.
Did the Post-War US-Japan relationship Consistently Reflect Japan’s “voluntary servitude”?
Matsuda suggests that the basic structure of the US-Japan relationship established by the 1960s was then maintained into and after the 1970s. The 1970s, however, was a turning point in Japanese diplomatic policy, due to significant transformations in the post-World War Two international order. With the reversion of Okinawa and normalization of diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1972, Japan, which for twenty years had devoted substantial resources to handling the issues which were left unresolved by the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the subsequent peace process, suddenly lost clear objectives for its foreign policy. Meanwhile, Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s triggered a realignment in East Asian international relations. Together with the relative decline of the Unite States, Japan increased its international presence as it became the third largest economy after the United States and the Soviet Union in 1968. With greater recognition of economic interdependence, states increasingly realized the need for multilateral cooperation on global issues like the sustainable supply of energy and resource, the North-South divide, or stagflation. The fundamental change in the environment surrounding the US-Japan relationship must have influenced its basic structure.
Furthermore, from the 1970s the joint statements the US and Japanese governments issued at summit meetings appealed to the shared common interests and universal values of both countries. The sudden announcement of the Nixon administration’s decision to normalize relations with the Chinese Communist government and the suspension of the dollar’s conversion into gold were blows to the Japanese government, and increasing trade friction poisoned US sentiment towards Japan, but the security ties, which were based on the US-Japan Security Treaty, were maintained and strengthened, with the deepening of cooperation in various fields. It cannot be ignored that Japanese leaders were convinced that Japan’s national interest lay in cooperation with the United States and other Western countries that shared universal values such as liberal democracy, a key justification for maintain the alliance with the United States.[20] How would a bilateral relationship pursuing common interests and universal values feature in the author’s conceptualization?
Matsuda concludes by promoting mutual understanding for a better US-Japan relationship. This sounds like a cliché, but I believe its importance has not changed. Both the United States and Japan are open societies, where all kinds of information is readily available on the internet, and social networking services have dramatically broadened the range of personal interactions. Nevertheless, this flood of information does not necessarily free the thinking of people or deepen their understandings of other cultures. There is still a great deal we can gain from cultural exchanges that bring people into contact with one another.
Response by Takeshi Matsuda, Osaka University and Kyoto University of Foreign Studies
The Aim of the Book
China is now steadily expanding its influence throughout the world, as evidenced by the One Belt, One Road initiative. Diplomatic and other conflicts between the United States and China are increasing day by day. Approximately 40 years ago, on the occasion of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China on 22 February 1972, there was a call by the American people for the relationship between the United States and Japan to also be fundamentally re-examined.[21] In the current period of transition, the global situation has changed significantly compared to more than 40 years ago, and there are still calls for a review of the US-Japan relationship from a global perspective.
Voluntary Subordination: The Logic and Psychology of the US-Japan Security System is a historical book that discusses the ruling order under the US-Japan security system in the context of post-war US-Japan relations. It was published in both English and Japanese in August 2022 so that the arguments in the book could be read by Japanese- and English-speaking readers.
US-Japan relations are historically unique in that even after the seven-year occupation of Japan ended in 1952, foreign military bases have remained on Japanese soil for over 70 years. In the wake of World War II, the United States emerged as a superpower unrivaled by other countries in the areas of security, politics, economy, and culture. The United States also demonstrated vital leadership and exercised strong influence in the process of building the post-war world order. As the victorious nation under the New World Order, the United States concluded treaties with many countries that were more advantageous to itself and created asymmetrical bilateral relationships through these treaties. The relationship between Japan and the United States, which concluded the Treaty of Peace with Japan in 1952, was no exception.
Japan began to harbor ambivalent feelings of love and hate for the United States. On the one hand, the Japanese people had a sense of admiration and respect for the United States, a superpower full of self-confidence. And from the experience of seeing and interacting with Americans close to them during the occupation period, the Japanese even began to feel an affinity for friendly Americans. On the other hand, when Japan established peace and the asymmetrical bilateral relationship of the US-Japan Security Treaty, the Japanese saw that the United States was forcibly employing its America First policies along with its intimidating flexing of its strength as a great power nation. Under these circumstances, the Japanese people felt disappointment, disillusionment, and deep-rooted distrust towards America.[22] It was easy to imagine that behind this, a sense of inferiority from the experience of defeat and occupation, as well as racial prejudice that had been felt since Commodore Matthew Perry’s “white flag” incident.[23]
One wonders why this difficult relationship between Japan and the United States, along with contradictory feelings of love and hate persist to this day, and why the United States insists that its words and deeds reflect absolute truths and universal values. And if Japanese raise objections to the US policies, why do the United States leaders assume that it is based on a lack of understanding or misunderstanding of the United States and interpret it as an unfriendly or anti-American action.[24] In short, why is it so difficult to build a solid relationship of trust between the United States and Japan?
To explore the answers to these questions, the author consulted as many sources as possible, including primary historical materials recently released in Japan and the United States, as well as research results on the history of US foreign relations and Japan’s domestic politics and diplomacy. In addition, the author also wrote earlier studies that put a considerable emphasis on cultural aspects and soft power.[25]
In the Japanese version of this book, two chapters (chapters 2 and 3), with Japanese readers among the “attentive public” in mind, contain a deep analysis of the psychology of the American people and American culture. In the English version, on the other hand, the author devoted quite a few pages to explaining Japan’s domestic politics, society, and culture, with an aim to reach not only overseas readers who have few opportunities to access “first-hand” information about Japan, but also readers in English-speaking countries who have fewer opportunities to experience Japanese culture and life.
In writing this book, the author came to realize how difficult it was not only to re-examine myself, but also to write history, because the subject of my research spans multiple countries. Perhaps non-Japanese readers may feel a certain déjà vu in the English commentary on American history and culture.[26] However, this is the price to pay for international cultural exchange when publishing a book of this nature in English. It is earnestly hoped that this book will reach readers in English-speaking countries, including Japan and the United States, regardless of their nationality, and that as many readers as possible will learn about “unexpected possibilities” and “alternative possibilities” in history as well as the future.[27] The author hopes that this will be an opportunity for people to think about what US-Japan relations should be like.
The Concept of “Voluntary Subordination”
“Voluntary Subordination” is a paradoxical concept that is made up of the two words of discordant meanings. One is “voluntary,” an adjective which denotes activity or autonomy, while the other is “subordination,” a noun which denotes passivity or heteronomy.
When children grow up, having been reared and educated to become obedient to their superiors since their childhood, they acquire the habit of obeying their superiors without even asking them the reason why. In other words, voluntary subordination is not something innate like one’s true character, but rather the product of a long-time habit and education.
Voluntary subordination becomes a reality not only when people forget they are free to express their own opinion, but also when they don’t remember they are intrinsically free. When the leaders and people of a given country have been chained to voluntary subordination so long under the ruling order of a given system, they lose sight of who they really are and what their country ought to be like. Then voluntary subordination comes into being. The country will see their people degenerate themselves into those who lack in the spirit of independence and self-reliance.[28]
Voluntary subordination is found in such relations as an asymmetrical power relationship, a cooperative relationship between “winners” and “losers,” and a relationship between rulers and the ruled. In the case of asymmetrical bilateral relations, voluntary subordination is recognized as such, not only when a weaker nation’s freedom of action is severely constrained by the powerful influence of a stronger nation, but also when the weaker nation continues to obey the stronger nation, while at the same time keeping loyalty and respect to the stronger nation.
Voluntary subordination is recognized when an inferior nation chooses to voluntarily relinquish part of its sovereignty and follow and cooperate with a superior nation—in particular, when the inferior nation finds it difficult to maintain its national security or to secure its vital economic interests by its own strength. It can be said that the ruling order of the US-Japan Security system in the asymmetrical bilateral relationship can be maintained by Japan’s voluntary subordination to the United States. To put it differently, such order can be sustained “by making the Japanese people voluntarily relinquish parts of their independence.”[29]
Reasons for Using Voluntary Subordination as a Key Concept – Part 1
Previous studies that attempted to elucidate the nature and characteristic of US-Japan relations made frequent use of a dichotomous framework and binary opposites like independence versus dependence and domination versus subordination.[30] Such a scholarly tendency was remarkable especially among studies in post-World War II US-Japan relations and those in the Cold War ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. The framework of dichotomy and binary opposites is useful since it makes their narratives more concise and clear-cut and it makes their arguments easier for readers to understand.
Reasons for Using Voluntary Subordination as a Key Concept – Part 2
Against the backdrop of the deepening of the US-Japan alliance in recent years, researchers’ interests and attention have been focused on US-Japan military cooperation and Japan’s role in it. According to Ayako Kusumoto, one of the reviewers, in this light, the approach of the dichotomy of domination and subordination is somewhat old-fashioned and, therefore, the studies which use the approach have become outdated.[31] In addition, Kusumoto criticizes the concept of voluntary subordination as not being adequate to explain post-war US-Japan relations, and also not meeting the needs of the present.
The use of the dichotomous framework of “domination versus subordination” as an analytical method does not, however, necessarily mean that the method is outdated. Perhaps it may be worth remembering a remark made by T. G. Otte, who said that “History is always vulnerable to attempts to exploit it for the needs of the present.”[32] As an old Chinese saying “onko chishin” tells us that “by exploring the old, one becomes able to understand the new,” the author believes that it is the ironclad rule of the study of history to keep reviewing and revising interpretations and methodologies when necessary.
As noted previously, voluntary subordination is the key concept in his book because it enables us to see and elucidate the internal and structural “mechanisms” of Japan’s ruling order which the US-Japan Security system established. It should be emphasized that the subject of the book, the internal and structural “mechanisms” of Japan’s ruling order have been kept hidden and subtly elusive. Few scholars have tackled the problem head-on as to how the internal and structural mechanisms of the US-Japan security system served to solidify Japan’s ruling order, even though this issue is critically important in keeping bilateral relations harmonious and amicable.
Moreover, the term voluntary subordination enables us to examine and shed light on contradictions and inconsistencies in the logic of the US-Japan security system, many of which the author believes caused the “distorted” or “twisted” bilateral relations between the US and Japan.[33]
While these remarks offer no more than a working hypothesis at this stage, we can assert that Japan’s pro-American policy, i.e., the policy of voluntary subordination to the United States, has served to maintain and solidify Japan’s current ruling order that the US-Japan Security system had made. The internal and structural “mechanisms” of the US-Japan Security system have served to further solidify ruling order in Japan. Finally, the author hypothesizes that the ruling regime of the post-war US-Japan Security system resembles strongly pre-war Japan’s ruling system of kokutai (national polity). The prototype of the post-war Japan’s ruling system stems from the kokutai ruling system of pre-war Japan which used kengyō (a professed intention) system and mikkyō (a real intention) system at the same time.
A brief explanation about pre-war Japanese kengyō system and mikkyō system is in order here. On the one hand, a literal translation of kengyō is the visible version of teachings of Buddhism are expressed in such a way as to be simple and easy to understand. Kengyō, serving as an interpretative system, saw the Japanese emperor as an absolute monarch with unlimited authority and power.
On the other hand, a literal translation of mikkyō is the secret version of teachings of Buddhism. It means that the hard-core matters should be kept secret to the outside world by making special arrangements. Mikkyō, serving as an interpretative system, viewed the emperor as a limited monarch whose authority and power were limited by the constitution and other laws.
The former kengyō interpretative system was aimed at substratum people (common people) who lived in feudalistic villages until the opening of Japan to foreign relations and received education no higher than elementary education, while the latter mikkyō system was intended for a handful of highly educated ruling elites. The pre-war Japanese ruling system that combined kengyō and mikkyō together was conceived by Itō Hirobumi, the first premier of Japan as a system of governance to support the absolutism of the emperor system.[34]
The post-war versions of kengyō and mikkyō must be viewed in terms of their counterparts of the pre-war version. The post-war kengyō sees the United States and Japan are good partners under a US-Japan equal partnership. This system also perceives Japan, embracing, under unconditional surrender, a set of new values entirely different from those before the war, witnessed by her rebirth as a pacifist democratic nation under Article 9 of the new constitution. In contrast, the post-war mikkyō system views Japan as a virtual “semi-sovereign” nation and as a country of voluntary subordination to the United States, because it allows US military bases to be stationed on its territory for so long, while maintaining its Self-Defense Forces the presence of which defies the spirit of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution.[35]
Let us return to the subject of voluntary subordination. According to Johan Galtung, in asymmetrical relations of an alliance, a superior nation needs in an inferior nation the forces which have an ineradicable political interest in forming an alliance and maintaining it. The forces within the inferior nation act as a bridgehead to protect a harmony of interests with the superior nation and become closely tied to the superior nation. Galtung goes on to state that the inferior nation subordinates its interests to those of the superior nation voluntarily, seeking to establish a harmony of interests with the superior nation. In this way, the two nations become closely coupled with one another.[36]
Let us place the points made above in the context of US-Japan relations. It is reasonable to argue that the forces in Japan which act as a “bridgehead” share ideologies of pro-Americanism, anti-Communism, and conservatism. They comprise a group of leaders who are ensconced at the center of power in Japan. And they advocate for voluntary subordination to the United States which supports the ruling order of the US-Japan Security system. As previously stated, the forces are the Japanese conservatives whom the author refers to as “the second actor in US-Japan relations.”[37]
To be more specific, the group who supports the US-Japan alliance as a bridgehead consists of the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) national leadership which at its core, comprises gifted elites raised in the hierarchical higher education system with the seven former Japanese imperial universities at the top, senior state bureaucrats in foreign affairs, defense, and finance ministries, the business, industrial, and media worlds around them, conservative organizations such as Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference, organized in 1997), and the elite universities and research institutes. They are vocal in advocating the importance of US-Japan cooperation and coordination. At the same time, they aim not only to stabilize their power base at home, but also to maintain their legitimacy to govern the nation by making best use of voluntary subordination to the United States as a principal axis.
Be that as it may, since the signing of the Treaty of Peace with Japan in September 1951, Japanese government leaders have been indulging in voluntary subordination to the United States even as Japan is being treated as a simi-sovereign nation.
The reasons are as follows. On the one hand, there are obvious difference in national power between the United States and Japan, Japanese admiration for the United States as the leading power of the free world, the ideological turn from pre-war Japanese ideas and thoughts to freedom and American democracy, and the complex feelings of adulation, flattery, and jealousy toward the victorious nation. On the other hand, there are bitter memories of war and the experience of unconditional surrender, and the Japanese character that makes it difficult to accept “defeat” as a historical reality. Moreover, there are psychological factors such as ethnic “prejudices” and a racial “inferiority complex” toward the victorious nation.[38]
In addition, the Japanese people tended to take to heart in old sayings, such as “winning by losing” and “gaining real profit by losing,” the lessons of which are deeply rooted in their daily lives. They seem to have acquired a habit of taking a long view of Japan’s national interests when involving these proverbs. These factors mentioned above seem to be at work when the Japanese decide to acquiesce in voluntary subordination to the United States, the neighboring country across the Pacific Ocean. A combination of factors mentioned above have therefore led both Japanese leaders and people accept voluntary subordination to the United States as the one and only option that appears both “realistic” and “reasonable” for Japan to adopt.
After the Treaty of Peace with Japan and the US-Japan Security Treaty were concluded in San Francisco in 1951, Japan regained its independence the following year. Since then, the Japanese people made the best use of a variety of benefits and advantages which the ruling order of the US-Japan Security system provided them. For instance, to reconstruct their country, they made frantic efforts to learn from the victorious United States the most up-to-date technological information and skills, as well as the newest ways and means to reorganize companies and communities. To an equal degree, the Japanese people were anxious to learn new political ideas and philosophies from the United States, such as pacifism and constitutional democracy and took them to heart.
The important point to remember is that the Japanese did not stop there. Because they adapted this newly acquired knowledge to fit Japanese culture and their ways of doing things, they kept their determined drive undiminished. That was precisely what the Yoshida Doctrine was all about—a policy of pro-Americanism, light armament, and economic nationalism with a special emphasis placed on economic growth. [39] By the early 1960s, the Japanese people came to feel that they made their dream of peace and economic prosperity come true. Namely, they enjoyed living an affluent and comfortable life under the severe conditions of the US-Soviet confrontation, as well as under the protection provided by the US nuclear umbrella.
On the other hand, the Japanese people acquiesced in paying no small price for adopting a policy of voluntary subordination to the United States. In the realm of legal and administrative systems, for example, (1) that the United States took it for granted that the “enemy clause” in Article 53 and Article 107 of the United Nations Charter could be invoked as a legal basis to have Japan (a former enemy state in World War II) toe the line; (2) restrictions on freedom of diplomacy and autonomy, as witnessed when an issue of recognizing Communist China as a sovereign state came to the fore during the 1970s; (3) infringement on Japan’s national sovereignty before the Japanese Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s ruling on the Sunagawa case on 16 December 1959, the authorities of both the United States and Japan, such as the American Embassy in Japan, the US Department of State, Japan’s Foreign Ministry, and the Japanese Supreme Public Prosecutors Office, kept in touch with each other secretly to exchange their views and they collaborated together with a common aim to influence the Supreme Court’s final decision into overturning the lower court’s decision; (4) restrictions of Japan’s national sovereignty seen in the “US-Japan Status of Forces Agreement,” for instance, should American soldiers stationed in Japan commit a crime, Japan has no jurisdiction over them; (5) that Japan is expected to cover the rising cost of keeping US military forces stationed in Japan; (6) joint US-Japan maneuvering resulting in the Hatoyama Yukio regime of Japan Democratic Party to be ousted from power.[40]
I argue that voluntary subordination to the United States has also cost the Japanese people much in terms of psychological and mental factors. Japanese politicians, for instance, cannot help considering the wishes of the US and feeling constrained when they negotiate with United States government officials. Second, the Japanese people have acquired the psychology of dependency on the victorious United States. Third, I argue that many Japanese people lack the virtues of self-reliance and independence.[41] Last, in a similar vein, the Japanese have become so peculiarly idiosyncratic as to be anxious to be liked by the “powerful winner.”
The so-called “1955 Regime” was established when the left and right wings of the Socialist Party were reunited and concurrently when two conservative wings were merged into the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) in 1955. Since then, one-party rule under the LDP continued to reign over Japan for almost 40 years until 1993. The successive governments of the LDP kept pursuing the policy line of voluntary subordination to the United States that was symbolized by the American military presence in Japan. And they continued to adopt Japan’s national security policy which depended on the protection of their country under the US nuclear umbrella.
As an example of how the post-war Japanese government, under the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party, utilized the mikkyō system, one can point to the negotiations for the revision of the US-Japan Security Treaty in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke promoted Article 4’s prior consultation system as a key feature of the new treaty to the Japanese public. He argued that the implementation of this prior consultation system would establish an equal relationship between Japan and the United States, strengthening Japan’s autonomy. However, contrary to Kishi’s explanation, the true purpose of the prior consultation system was to allow the United States to command Japan’s Self-Defense Forces in case of emergencies in the East Asian region.[42] Fortunately, no situation, such as the Korean War, that would have significantly escalated tensions in East Asia, so the prior consultation system essentially remained a fictional clause and was never put into practice. Furthermore, the continued recognition of the freedom of use of US military bases in Japan as a privilege for the US military remained unchanged.
At home, the Japanese government under the LDP leadership has pursued the policy of “production-ism (seisan daiichi shugi)” based on a neo-corporatist ideology, on the one hand, and on the other, it has adopted a policy of “mass consumerism (tairyō shōhi shugi)” with an ambitious aim to make Japan the second richest in the free world. As mentioned above, the LDP leadership sought to soften not only any negative impact but also any unfavorable impression that the LDP’s policy of voluntary subordination to the United States might give to the Japanese people at large.
Concurrently, the government in Tokyo left no stone unturned to drive home to its people and the rest of the world a positive and peace-loving image of Japan as a nation deeply committed to pacifism and democracy. While doing so, the government leaders never forgot reminding their people and the world that Japan was the only nation having suffered an atomic bombing.
In this manner, the LDP-led government, despite recognizing the contradictions arising from two different sets of values and the “twist” in the Japan-US relationship, skillfully employed both kengyō and mikkyō systems, or in other words, the public face and the hidden face of post-war policies, to maintain a path of voluntary subordination.
I am honored that Voluntary Subordination: The Logic and Psychology of the US-Japan Security System was featured in the H-Diplo Roundtable, and I would like to express my sincere gratitude for being given this rare opportunity. The author believes that the most important task of a book reviewer is to “bridge the intellectual dialogue” between the author and potential readers. In that sense, the author would like to thank both Ayako Kusumoto and Craig Hayden for their meticulous workmanship as reviewers. Finally, the author would like to extend his heart-felt gratitude to Lloyd Gardner for recommending the author’s book to the H-Diplo editors Diane Labrosse, Masami Kimura and to Itsushi Kimura for his understanding and cooperation in this project.
[1] Charles A. Beard, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” The American Historical Review 39:2 (January 1934): 219-231.
[2] The press conference is discussed in Lloyd C. Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: From World War II Through Dienbienphu, 1941-1954 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 197.
[3] The views expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US government.
[4] Ryo Sahashi, “Japan’s Strategy amid U.S.-China Confrontation,” China International Strategy Review 2:2 (2020): 232-245, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42533-020-00061-9.
[5] Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “How Not to Deal with a Rising China: A U.S. Perspective,” International Affairs 98:5 (2022): 1635-1651, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac117.
[6] Nori Katagiri, “Shinzo Abe’s Indo-Pacific Strategy: Japan’s Recent Achievement and Future Direction,” Asian Security 16:2 (2020): 179-200, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14799855.2019.1607304.
[7] Andrew Oros, “The Continued Centrality of the United States to Japan’s Security Doctrine in an Era of Expanding Security Partnerships,” in Paul Midford and Wilhelm Vosse, eds., New Directions in Japan’s Security (London: Routledge, 2020), 215-227.
[8] For a Gramscian perspective on the intersection of civil society and politics in Japan, see Dominic Kelly, “Ideology, Society, and the Origins of Nuclear Power in Japan,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 9:1 (2015): 47-64, DOI: 10.1215/18752160-2846105; Simon Avenell, “Japan and the Global Revival of the “Civil Society’ Idea: Contemporaneity and the Retreat of Criticality,” Japan Forum 23:3 (2019): 311-338, DOI: 10.1080/09555803.2011.597510; For the links between soft power and Gramscian hegemony, see Geraldo Zahran & Leonardo Ramos, “From Hegemony to Soft Power: Implications of a Conceptual Change,” in Inderjeet Parmar and Michael Cox, eds., Soft Power and U.S. Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2010), 12-31.
[9] See also Francis Tenny, The Japan-United States Friendship Commission: A History of the Commission Commemorating the 20th Anniversary, 1975–1995, (Washington DC: Japan-United States Friendship Commission 1995).
[10] George R. Packard, Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
[11] The fact that “No” to Ieru Nippon: Shin Nichibei Kankei no Hosaku [The Japan Can Say No: The Cards for New Relationship between the United States and Japan] (Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1989), written by Ishihara Shintaro and Morita Akio, was in the top 5 bestseller books in 1990 suggests many Japanese shared the vague anger against US-Japan relations.
[12] For example, see Toyoshita Narahiko, Anpo Jōyaku no Seiritsu: Yoshida Gaikō to Tennō Gaikō [The Conclusion of the US-Japan Security Treaty: The Foreign Policy by Yoshida Shigeru and the Emperor Showa] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996); Miura Yōichi, Yoshida Shigeru to San Furanshisuko Kōwa [Yoshida Shigeru and the San Francisco Peace Treaty] (Tokyo: Ōtsuki Shoten, 1996).
[13] Aketagawa Tōru, Nichibei Gyōsei Kyōtei no Seijishi: Nichibei Chii Kyōtei Kenkyū Josetsu [The Political History of the Administrative Agreement: Introduction to Studies of U.S.-Japan Status of Forces Agreement] (Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankai, 1999).
[14] John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878-1954 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies at Harvard University, 1979), and Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
[15] Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan in the American Century (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018); Jennifer M. Miller, Cold War Democracy: The United States and Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[16] One of the most recent work is Andrew L. Oros, Japan’s Security Renaissance: New Policies and Politics for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
[17] For Example, see Itayama Mayumi, Nichibei Dōmei ni okeru Kyōdō Bōei Taisei no Keisei: Jōyaku Teiketsu kara “Nichibei Bōei Kyōryoku no tame no Shishin” Sakutei made [The Formation of the Collective Defense System in the U.S.-Japan Alliance] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2020); Yamaguchi Wataru, Reisen Shūenki no Nichibei Kankei: Bunka suru Sōgō Anzen Hoshō [U.S.-Japan Relations in the 1980s: The Differentiation of the Idea of Comprehensive Security] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobō, 2023).
[18] The first item of the courses of action in the economic field in NSC 125/1, approved on 7 August 1952, was to “facilitate the achievement by Japan of an economy which is self-supporting, expanding and capable of maintaining adequate living standards, supporting the defense of Japan, and contributing to the defense of the Pacific area.” No. 588, the U.S. Department of State ed., Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1952-1954, China and Japan, Vol. 14, Part 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985): 1307. Almost same as in NSC 5516/1, “Encourage Japan to expand and stabilize its economy so that it will be self-supporting and capable of maintaining gradually improving living standards and defense forces and of contributing to the strength of the free nations of Asia.” No. 61, FRUS 1955-1957, Japan, Vol. 23, part 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991): 61.
[19] On the concept of bandwagoning, see for example Randall L. Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,” International Security 19:1 (Summer 1994): 72-107.
[20] Chō Fumitaka, “Chikyū Syakai” Jidai no Nichibei Kankei: “Yūkōteki Kyōsō” kara “Dōmei” e [U.S.-Japan Relations in the Emergence of “Global Community”: From the “Friendly Competitive” Relationship to the “Alliance”] (Tokyo: Yūshisha, 2022); Yamaguchi, Reisen Shūenki no Nichibei Kankei.
[21] From the 1970s to the 1980s, prominent Americans, such as journalist Theodore While, Professor Chalmers Johnson, former Department of Commerce officer Clyde V. Prestowitz, editor of the Atlantic Monthly James Fallows, and others called for re-examination of Japan and US-Japan bilateral relations. They came to be known as Japan revisionists. See Frank Gibney, Japan: The Fragile Superpower (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975); Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Theodore White, “The Danger from Japan,” The New York Times Magazine 28 July 1985: 21-22, 31, 37-41, 57-58; Clyde V. Prestowitz, Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1988); James Fallows, “Containing Japan,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 1989); James Fallows, More Like Us (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989); Walter LaFeber, The Clash: US-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). For historiographical essays, see Richard J. Samuels, “Amerika no ‘Nihon-ron’ wo Sōtenken suru [Japanese Political Studies and the Myth of the Independent Intellectual],” Chuo Koron (May 1992): 134-159; Chuo Koron (June 1992): 190-207; John Dower, “Nihon wo Hakaru [Sizing up (and breaking down) Japan],” Shisō 855 (September 1995):865-895; Shisō 856 (October 1995): 67-89; Laura E. Hein, “Free-Floating Anxieties on the Pacific: Japan and the West Revisited,” Diplomatic History 20:3 (Summer 1996): 414-419; Yutaka Sasaki, “Amerika no Nihonzō no Hensen–Senchu-Sengoki kara 1990 nendai made [An Analysis of Changes in American Images of Japan-From the Time of World War II to the 1990s],” Sōai Daigaku Kenkyu Ronshu 15:2 (March 1999): 79-114.
[22] John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: The New Press, 1999):19-564; Edward Seidensticker, Tokyo Rising: The City since the Great Earthquake (Tokyo: Hayakawa Publishing Inc., 1992): 129-190; Nishimura Kumao, San Furanshisuko Heiwa Joyaku・Nichibei Anpo Joyaku [San Francisco Peace Treaty/US-Japan Security Treaty] (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 1999): 11-238; The Staff of the Asahi, The Pacific Rivals: A Japanese View of Japanese-American Relations (New York & Tokyo: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1972): 3-408.
[23] Commodore Matthew C. Perry visited Japan twice, in July 1853 and the early spring of 1954. On the first visit, he successfully delivered President Millard Filmore’s letter addressed to the Emperor of Japan to the Shogun’s representatives at Kurihama (Kanagawa Prefecture). Along with the presidential communication asking for the opening of Japan, Perry presented his own letter addressed to the Emperor of Japan to the Bakufu officials together with two white flags. The letter explained that in case of war between the United States and Japan, Japan was bound to be defeated. Then Japan should ask for peace by hoisting the flags. The intimidating message of the letter resulted in Japan’s acquiescence in American demands and led to the conclusion of the treaty between the United States of America and the Empire of Japan in the following year. Since then, it has been known as the “White Flag” incident (Perry’s bluff diplomacy or gun-boat diplomacy), the action of which was contrary to the US president’s explicit instructions not to resort to hostile and intimidatory actions. Miwa Kimitada, “Perry’s ‘Fourth’ Letter Handed to the Bakufu Officials in July 1953,” International Relations 102 (February 1993): 1-21; Miwa Kimitada, Kakusareta Peri no ‘Shiro Hata’ [Perry’s Hidden White Flags] (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1999); Hasegawa Yūichi, “Nichibei Kankei ni okeru ‘Peri’ no Kioku” [The Memory of Perry in US-Japan Relations] in Kindai Nihon no Kokusai Ninshiki [International Perceptions of Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Ashi Shobō, 2016): 31-60; Imazu Kōichi, Peri Teitoku no Kimitsu Hōkokusho [Commodore Perry’s Confidential Reports] (Kanagawa: Haidensu, 2007): 82, 100.
[24] Edward W. Barrett, Truth is Our Weapon (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1953): 200, 209; Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: US Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency (Washington and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2007): 148-155; Eugene Dooman, “Japan between East and West, Fifth Meeting, May 23, 1956,” Council on Foreign Relations Discussion Meeting Report, (New York: Manuscript Division, Council on Foreign Relations): 1-2. cited in Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: US Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency. 219; Confidential Cable on Presidential Visit (June 15, 1960). Japan and United States: Diplomatic, Security and Economic Relations, 1960-1976 (Published by Bell & Howell Information and Learning, Ann Arbor, Michigan), stored in National Security Archives, George Washington University Library, Washington, D. C. (Abbreviated as Japan-US, NSA 00053).
[25] Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: US Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency; Matsuda, Taibei Izon no Kigen: Amerika no Sofuto Pawâ Senryaku [The Origins of Dependency on the United States: American Soft Power Strategy] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015); Matsuda, ed. The Age of Creolization in the Pacific: In Search of Emerging Culture and Shared Values in the Japan-America Borderlands (Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 2001).
[26] In his view, Craig Hayden remarks that “…the sections on US history may be less useful to the core argument of the book.”
[27] Shindō Eiichi, Bunkatsu sareta Ryodo: Mōhitotsu no Sengoshi [Partitioned Territory: Another Postwar History] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002): 333-335; Toyoshita Narahiko, Showa Tennō no Sengo Nihon: Kenpō・Anpo Taisei ni itaru Michi [Showa Emperor’s Postwar Japan: The Road to the Constitution and Security Treaty System] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2015).
[28] Étienne de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire [Jihatsuteki Reijyū Ron] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2013): 35, 43-45, 70-71, 145-146, 241-243.
[29] Nishitani Osamu, “Gendai Nihon no ‘Jihatsuteki Reijyū” [‘Voluntary Subordination’ of Contemporary Japan] in de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire: 235-241.
[30] Matsuda, “The Coming of the Pacific War: Japanese Perspectives” Reviews in American History 14:4 (December 1986): 629-652.
[31] Kusumoto states that “…over the last twenty years, more research is being conducted in Japan on the development of the bilateral security relationship since the Cold War, focusing on the transformation of the two countries’ military ‘cooperation’ at various levels.” She goes on to argue that “to approach the US-Japan alliance from the perspective of the ‘dominant-subordinate’ relationship may seem somewhat old fashioned.… What do they tell us about the relationship itself.”
[32] H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-22 on Simon Reid-Henry, Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971-2017. 25 January 2021, Note 67; https://issforum.org/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-XXII-22.pdf
[33] Katō Norihiro, Sengo Nyūmon [An Introduction to the Postwar Years] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2015): 18-21, 52-60, 379-382, 391-396, 501-507.
[34] Kuno Osamu and Trurumi Shunsuke, Gendai Nihon no Shisō [The Philosophy of Modern Japan] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956): 132-136.
[35] Katō Norihiro, Sengo Nyūmon [An Introduction to the Postwar Years] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2015): 376-377.
[36] Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research 2 (1971): 83-84; 90-91.
[37] Matsuda, Voluntary Subordination: The Logic and Psychology of the U.S.-Japan Security System (Hirosima: Keisuisha, 2022): 15-20.
[38] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery [Haiboku no Bunka-Haisen no Torauma/Kaifuku/Saisei] (Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2007).
[39] Katō Norihiro, Sengo Nyūmon [An Introduction to the Postwar Years] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2015): 370-372, 376-378, 380-381.
[40] De la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, 235-239; Yoshida Toshihiro, Kenshō・Hōchikokka Hōkai: Sunagawa Saiban to Nichibei Himitsu Kōshō [The Verification: The Collapse of the Rule of Law: The Sunagawa Trial and Japan-America Secret Negotiations] (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 2014); Maedomari Hiromori, Hontōwa Kenpō yori Taisetsuna ‘Nichibei Chii Kyōtei Nyūmon [‘An Introduction to the Japan-US Status of Forces Agreement’ which is truthfully more important than the Constitution] (Tokyo: Sōgensha, 2013).
[41] De la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire, 35,70-71; Nishitani Osamu, “Gendai Nihon no ‘Jihatsuteki Reijyū” [‘Voluntary Subordination’ of Contemporary Japan] in de la Boétie, Discours de la servitude volontaire: 236-241; Doi Takeo, ‘Amae’ no Kōzō [The Anatomy of Dependence] (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1971); Doi Takeo, Zoku ‘Amae’ no Kōzō [vol. 2 The Anatomy of Dependence] (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 2001).
[42] Toyoda Yukiko, Nichibei Anpo to Jizen Kyōgi Seido: ‘Taitōsei’ no Iji Sōchi [US-Japan Security Treaty System and Prior Consultation System: An Equality-Support System] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2015): 53-101, 260-263; Suenami Yasushi, Kyūjō ‘Kaishaku Kaiken’ kara Mitsuyaku made. Taibei Jyuzoku no Shōtai: Bei Kōbunshokan karano Hōkoku [From Article 9 of the Interpretations of the Revised Constitution to Secret Agreements, The True Character of Subordination to the United States: Reports from the American Archives] (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2012): 178-195; Yabe Kōji, Shittewa Ikenai 2: Nihon no Shuken wa Kōshite Ushinawareta [Not Supposed to Know 2: Japan’s Sovereignty Was Lost This Way] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2018): 215-226; Hara Yoshihisa, Sengo Nihon wo Toinaosu: Nichibei Hitaisho no Dainamizumu [Re-examining Postwar Japan: Dynamism of Asymmetrical US-Japan Relations] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2020): 96-142.