Identity entrepreneurship and policy change in Japan

Current national identity research in international relations is divided into ‘liberal constructivists’, understanding identity as a shared norm, and post-structuralists, seeing identity as a product of distinguishing from ‘others’. When confronted with modern Japan, these two are insufficient. The ‘liberal’ approach fails to acknowledge the ideational factors influencing the identity reformulation; ‘relational’ approach fails to define why the nascent identity change is such severely constrained and why some identities stick more than others. An ecclectical, reflexive approach combining these two provides a better understanding. While ‘relational’ approach rightly explains how Japan has discursively defined itself as a ‘pacifist’, ‘rational’, ‘democratic’ (vis-à-vis USA, China etc.), ‘liberal’ approach is better at illustrating, how some of these identities (i.e. pacifism) sedimented into a form of a shared norm and how they subsequently exercised constraints over further discursive identity change propagated by the ‘relational’ approach (‘othering’ advocates constant change). These constraints can be found on two levels: identity entrepreneurs and emotions. In the last three decades, entrepreneurs (article focuses on Koizumi and Abe administrations) have been severely constrained by pacifist groups in politics and bureaucracy (eg Sokka Gakkai, MoFA). Furthermore, the shared 'pacifist' identity played a strong role in containing the entrepreneurs from advocating popular emotional change. That is why - by coming back to emprical reality - this paper argues that the much-heralded 'new revisionist Japan' is an inflated concept.