There are two, one might say entirely opposite, approaches to analyzing the relationship between Japan’s domestic politics and its foreign and national security. One is to focus on the successive political leaders and cabinets and trace what kinds of political principles have been advocated and what kinds of policies have been constructed by each of these leaders and cabinets over the years. If this is the deductive approach, the alternative is the inductive approach. The inductive approach entails first identifying what kinds of external foreign and national security developments have impacted upon Japan and exploring how these have affected the internal political mood and public opinion and the expectations upon the government as to how it should respond. It then addresses how these reactions and expectations have in turn guided the foreign and security policies of each of the cabinets.
Here I adopt the latter of the two approaches. As opposed to a state that creates its policies in line with a predetermined strategy direction, Japan is more what can be described as an “adaptive state”—one that takes the blows from external forces and creates and implements policy in the process of adapting to those impacts.
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