Program on U.S.-Japan Relations

New Grant Award

The Program on U.S.-Japan Relations was awarded a multi-year grant from the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership (CGP) to investigate a series of topics relating to the general theme, "Japan's Global Leadership in the 21st Century: Challenges Ahead." The grant offers funds for international research travel for Harvard faculty and graduate students, for conferences at Harvard and an off-site abroad, and for other activities. In its current first year, the topic is "The Future of East Asia." On April 29, the Program sponsored a symposium with Susan Pharr (program director), Victor Cha (Georgetown University), Sheila Smith (Council on Foreign Relations), Akio Takahara (University of Tokyo), and Zheng Wang (Seton Hall University).

New Books

The following books were recently published by former postdoctoral fellows of the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations.

The International Minimum: Creativity and Contradiction in Japan's Global Engagement, 1933–1964

By Jessamyn R. Abel

The International Minimum, by Jessamyn AbelThis book traces the evolution of the internationalist worldview in Japan by examining both official policy and general discourse surrounding epochal moments such as Japan’s withdrawal from the League and admission into the United Nations, the failed and successful attempts to host a Tokyo Olympiad, and wartime and postwar regional conferences in Tokyo and Bandung, Indonesia. Bringing these varied elements together produces a synthetic history of internationalism, imperialism, and the performance of diplomacy in the twentieth century, when new global norms required a minimum level of international engagement. This story is told through the materials of both high diplomacy and mass culture. Unpublished documents in government and private archives reveal one layer of the formation of Japanese internationalism. The public discourse found in popular journals, books, newspapers, advertisements, poems, and songs articulates what would become the common-sense views of international relations that helped delineate the realm of the possible in imperial and postwar Japanese foreign policy. (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015)

Jessamyn R. Abel was an advanced research fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations in 2008–2009. She is now an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University.

Electoral Reform and National Security in Japan: From Pork to Foreign Policy

By Amy Catalinac

Electoral Reforms and National Security in Japan, by Amy CatalinacJapan is the third-largest economy in the world and a key ally of the United States. Yet the determinants of Japanese security policy are not well understood. The question of why Japan never sought the independent military capabilities that would be commensurate with its economic power has puzzled scholars of international relations for decades. Applying new tools for the quantitative analysis of text to a new collection of 7,497 Japanese-language election manifestos used in elections between 1986 and 2009, this book argues that the electoral strategies politicians in the ruling party were forced to adopt under Japan’s old electoral system made it extraordinarily difficult for them to focus on security issues and to change security policy. It was only when their electoral strategies shifted after electoral reform in 1994 that these same politicians became able to pay attention and change security policy. (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Amy Catalinac was a postdoctoral fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations in 2011–2012 and a former WCFIA Graduate Student Associate (Department of Government). She is now an assistant professor at New York University. 

Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Government Accountability in Japan and South Korea

By Celeste L. Arrington

Accidental Activists, by Celeste ArringtonGovernment wrongdoing or negligence harms people worldwide, but not all victims are equally effective at obtaining redress. In Accidental Activists, Celeste L. Arrington examines the interactive dynamics of the politics of redress to understand why not. Relatively powerless groups like redress claimants depend on support from political elites, active groups in society, the media, experts, lawyers, and the interested public to capture democratic policy makers’ attention and sway their decisions. 

Arrington draws on her extensive fieldwork to illustrate these dynamics through comparisons of the parallel Japanese and South Korean movements of victims of harsh leprosy control policies, blood products tainted by Hepatitis C, and North Korean abductions. Her book thereby highlights how citizens in Northeast Asia—a region grappling with how to address Japan’s past wrongs—are leveraging similar processes to hold their own governments accountable for more recent harms. Accidental Activists also reveals the growing power of litigation to promote policy change and greater accountability from decision makers. (Cornell University Press, 2016)

Celeste L. Arrington was an advanced research fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations in 2010–2011. She is now the Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University.