Book reviews 267

Japan Rising: the resurgence of Japanese

power and purpose
Kenneth B. Pyle
New York: Public Affairs, 2007, 433 pp.
ISBN-10: 1-58648-417-6 (Hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-1-58648-417-0 (Hardcover), $29.95

This is a book about Japanese grand strategy. Its author, Kenneth B. Pyle, is
one of the authoritative voices on Japan in the United States – a history

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professor and the founding president of the National Bureau of Asian
Research (NBAR), a major US think-tank on Asia.
The book is addressed primarily to the policy community of the United
States. It offers a timely contribution on Japan when China attracts the vast
majority of policy circles’ attention in Washington, D.C. As its title indicates,
the book tells Americans that Japan, while shedding its Cold War strategy
based on the Yoshida Doctrine, is ‘preparing to become a major player in the
strategic struggles of the twenty-first century’ ( p. 17). The most policy-relevant
section is ‘Epilogue: Japan’s Twenty-First Century Resurgence,’ whose basic
conclusion is that a realist Japan is coming back. In Pyle’s view, history is
repeating: Japan is, as it has done since the Meiji period, refocusing itself to
maximize its strategic interest, now that security-institutional reforms have
started.
But more relevant to the readers of the International Relations of the
Asia-Pacific is the book’s academic contributions.
Among them, the most important is a successful marriage of international
relations theory and Japanese diplomatic history. More specifically, Pyle
applies a structural-realist framework à la Robert Gilpin’s War and Change in
World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1981) to the 150-year history of
Japanese foreign affairs. Pyle offers the first systematic attempt to apply, expli-
citly, a realist framework to the entire historical period of modern Japanese
diplomatic experience. Combining his massive knowledge of history with a
realist theory, Pyle has achieved a breakthrough.
Pyle paints a picture of Japan as a realist (rational-materialist) state – even
in the Cold War period – in sharp contrast to the irrational or even ‘pathologi-
cal’ state that we heard from such analysts as Karel van Wolferen, as well as to
the argument, articulated by such constructivists as Thomas Berger and Peter
Katzenstein, that a Cold War Japan is as a serious anomaly to realism.
Pyle sees Japan as a highly sensitive state to changing international con-
straints and opportunities, to the extent that it is even prepared to re-organize
its domestic institutions to meet the international challenges. He sees a
268 Book reviews

recurrent and consistent pattern of behavior in how Japan responds to shifts in

the international system, which stems from the strategic (or political) culture
of (feudal) Japan, as well as from the ‘psychic wound’ sustained in the early
Meiji period ( p. 125; also see pp. 26 –27).
More concretely, there have been five international orders in East Asia, and
Pyle sees what he calls ‘realist patterns in the Japanese response’ ( p. 41) when-
ever Japan has encountered a new international order. These orders are:
(1) the collapse of the Sinocentric order and the arrival of the Westphalian
imperialist order (mid-nineteenth century and early Meiji); (2) the Washington
Treaty System of the interwar period; (3) the disintegration of that system,
replaced by anarchy in the 1930s, out of which Japan sought to establish its

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regional hegemony, ending up with a war with the United States; (4) the Cold
War order in East Asia emerging after Japan’s defeat; and (5) the emerging
post-Cold War order ( p. 28). Japan’s culture-based responses are characterized
by attentiveness to power; pragmatism and the weakness of transcendent and
universal ideas; adaptation and accommodation; the pursuit of autonomy and
regional hegemony; emulation and innovation; and concerns for rank and
honor (Chapter 2).
In other words, Pyle envisions a Japan, driven by its political culture,
responding opportunistically to shifts in its international environments, so that
it can maximize its national interest defined in terms of power. It is a state
that takes the international system largely as a given condition, rather than as
something it helps building. It is a state that does not believe, in the final
analysis, in universal ideas like democracy and human rights. (This point
would have a profound, even potentially negative, implication to a future
Japan –US relationship, if US leaders wholly accept it.) In short, Japan is a
realist state per excellence.
This is the answer to what Pyle calls the Japan puzzle for Americans. That
is, American observers have often misperceived or misunderstood the true
purpose and motivation behind Japanese foreign policy as irrational, inconsist-
ent, and unpredictable. They are all wrong, Pyle argues, because Japanese
foreign policy behavior is rational, consistent, and even predictable. His frame-
work makes the Japanese behavior intelligible.
Accordingly, the chapters of the book are organized to elaborate this thesis.
Despite its achievement, the book is not without problems. First, one can
see analytical biases of the book’s argument. For example, Pyle implicitly
accepts the assumption of Japan as a unitary, rational actor united by a
common culture, which underemphasizes divisions within the Japanese state
and masks the military bureaucracies’ narrow interests trumping Japan’s
broader national interest, especially in post-Meiji periods. Such bureaucratic
pathologies have been a major theme found in a great many works by
Japanese military historians. A case in point is the navy’s involvement in
 Book reviews 269

Japan’s 1941 decision to go to war against the United States. As Sadao Asada
and other historians have found, the vested interests and raison d’être of the
navy as a bureaucracy were critical in admirals’ (and Japan’s) fatal decision to
start a war against the United States across the Pacific, although it was all
clear that such a war was unlikely to be winnable – a national disaster. The
Japanese navy’s bureaucratic interests trumped national interests. But such a
reality is masked in Pyle’s book. Instead, we are told that Japan as one unified
state, concerned with its rank and honor, made that decision ( pp. 64–65,
202–204).
In addition, some American biases can be noted in the book: (1) few
usages of recent Japanese scholarships on Japanese diplomatic history

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(especially on the early Yoshida period); (2) an exclusive focus on great power
dynamics on Northeast Asia (e.g. Japan’s good relationship with ASEAN
based on the Fukuda Doctrine is barely mentioned); and (3) an exclusive
focus on traditional security affairs (i.e. Japan’s active agenda in human secur-
ity is basically ignored).
Secondly, the book under-specifies the scope conditions that its theory
applies. Pyle seems to recognize transitional periods when Japan has had to go
through some domestic transformation until it becomes a rational state once
again. In such a period, in other words, his theoretical framework does not fit
well with the reality, as Japan may behave irrationally or in a confused
manner – take, for example, Japan’s response to the 1991 Gulf War. When
does such a transition period start and end? Although an expert like Pyle may
be able to provide an answer after empirical observations, his theory in its
own terms cannot and it has to be supplemented by other theories.
All in all, Japan Rising, is an academic book in the guise of a policy book.
It reflects the intellectual richness and life-long achievement of a renowned
Japan scholar in the United States, marrying international relations theory
and Japanese diplomatic history. It will be a must read for the students of
Japanese foreign affairs.

Tsuyoshi Kawasaki
Political Science Department
Simon Fraser University
Canada

doi:10.1093/irap/lcn006