Anxiety and Japanese Identity Change

Identity change is an important phenomenon in international relations for several reasons. It is often seen as enabling security and foreign policy change. It is also seen both as a reason for and as a solution to violent conflicts. As such, it is important to understand how identity change occurs. This paper is concerned with the crucial role of anxiety in identity change. Recent interest in the concept of anxiety in International Relations (IR) has been triggered by the burgeoning literature on ontological security. However, with some exceptions, ontological security theory has been preoccupied with the ways in which states seek to protect their ontological security and avoid identity change. It has thus been criticized for being excessively concerned with continuity at the expense of change. This is arguably because much of the ontological security literature has been influenced by R.D. Laing’s book The Divided Self, which focuses on pathological varieties of anxiety. By contrast, this paper draws more broadly on existential-phenomenological psychology, which typically differentiates between pathological and non-pathological anxiety. Pathological or neurotic anxiety, is closely related to Laing’s understanding of ontological insecurity. Those who suffer from neurotic anxiety are unable to be truly creative and therefore cannot effectuate change. Non-neurotic anxiety, by contrast, cannot be escaped and is a necessary aspect of the human condition. It is also crucial for creative activity. Creative activity is dependent on us being able to imagine a contradiction between expectations and reality. Those who suffer from neurotic anxiety, however, are unable to bring the two together. The contradiction therefore remains a contradiction. It is arguably because ontological security theory is influenced by Laing, who focuses on the pathological variety of anxiety, that it has mostly been concerned with continuity. Conversely, non-neurotic anxiety makes it possible to bridge expectation and reality, thereby overcoming the contradiction and creatively transforming reality. Through such a process, anxiety-creating experiences of the non-neurotic variety make identity change possible. Anxiety arises when a value held to be vital to one’s ontological security is threatened. By constructively confronting such anxiety-generating experiences, relationships with others and the relational identities bound up in those relationships can be altered. Equipped with these theoretical insights, the paper explores the links between anxiety on the one hand and change and continuity on the other in Japanese identity constructions in relation to four others—China, Taiwan, South Korea and United States. The findings suggest that in these identity constructions, anxiety is bound up with 1) ideas about competitive success, and 2) the question of whether the other is considered ‘pro-Japanese’ or ‘anti-Japanese’.