Between a rock and a hard place? Japan's Government Policy towards the US and the PRC

Japan is perhaps the third party with the biggest stakes in the structural change centered upon U.S. relative decline and China’s rapid rise. The paper posits that security and economic stimuli place Japan in a delicate position between the Scylla of the US-Japan alliance, with its entrapment and abandonment pitfalls, and the Charybdis of antagonizing a re-emerging China, with whom the Japanese economy is rapidly integrating. Structural forces aside, this paper argues that individual leaders have responded differently to the above strategic landscape. Following the resignation of Prime Minister Koizumi in 2006, Japan’s government has pursued new engagement and hedging policies aimed at the PRC and, at the same time, has attempted at redefining the role of its trans-Pacific alliance. Fluctuation between the engagement and hedging component of Japan’s China policy -and the parallel quiescence or bolstering of the US-Japan alliance- is caused by a number of factors, including the under-analyzed personalization of foreign policy making, particularly the growing influence of individual PMs. I analyze the consecutive administrations and foreign policies under four different PMs, Abe Shinzo, Fukuda Yasuo, Aso Taro, and Hatoyama Yukio. As thoroughbreds of central lineages and The PRC of the Japanese political establishment, their Weltanschauung, desired foreign, US and China policies present strong similarities with those of their illustrious forefathers. Leaders do matter in Japan and the main target of their policy agenda has been the management of their country’s two most important bilateral relations. Their personal idiosyncrasies and prolonged interest in diplomacy have been central in the exercise of leadership, to the point that concern with foreign policy-making distracted them from the imperatives of politics; failure to stay in power more than a year has been partly of their own making.