Introduction for Overcoming Isolationism
Introduction
Three Puzzles
In a sudden and unexpected burst of leadership, Japan, beginning with the Nakayama proposal of July 1991 and continuing in 1992 and 1993 with several initiatives by then–prime minister Miyazawa Kiichi, played a decisive role in a process that culminated in the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)1 Regional Forum (ARF), East Asia’s first region-wide multilateral security forum, in 1993. The ARF, in turn, paved the way for additional multilateral security institutions to be created in subsequent years, institutions in which Japan’s leadership often played a crucial role. The 1991 Nakayama proposal (named after then–foreign minister Nakayama Tarō) is widely regarded by many Japanese foreign policy elites as Japan’s first postwar regional security initiative.2 It and the subsequent Miyazawa initiatives of 1992–93 for creating a region-wide security dialogue did indeed represent Japan’s first independent international security initiatives since the end of World War II and the country’s first attempt to be a leading architect in constructing a regional security institution. These initiatives also marked the definitive end of Japan’s Cold War–era policy of regional security isolation and ushered in a new era of increasing bilateral, as well as multilateral, security engagement with a growing range of security partners in East Asia.3
Japan’s leadership in promoting regional security multilateralism represents an important, but little-recognized, success in Japanese foreign policy. This is because the 1991 Nakayama proposal paved the way for the creation of the first regional multilateral security institutions in East Asia, starting with the ARF in 1993. In this context, Japan’s role in overcoming US opposition to regional security multilateralism proved to be pivotal. According to Christopher Hughes, “That Japan, with its sudden burst of diplomatic activity had taken a leading role in establishing a multilateral security dialogue in the Asia-Pacific, was demonstrated by its having preempted US foreign policy for perhaps the first time since the Second World War.”4
The Nakayama proposal thus represents a bold departure from Japan’s previous policy toward regional security, which was isolationist and reactive to US demands, and marked the first time since the end of World War II that Japan had launched a regional security initiative, let alone in the face of clear American opposition. Tokyo’s previous role had been predicated on almost total dependence on the US alliance for security, and on a promise, embodied in the Fukuda Doctrine, that Japan would never again become a military power, a promise that meant steadfast abstention from any military cooperation with other East Asian states. Japan had refused even to talk about regional security with its neighbors.
The Nakayama proposal set in motion two significant changes in Japan’s regional security strategy. First, although Japan continued to reaffirm its 1977 Fukuda Doctrine pledge to never again become a military power, Tokyo redefined this promise to allow it to openly discuss regional security with its neighbors, bilaterally as well as multilaterally, and to consider non-combat security cooperation beyond dialogue through regional multilateral structures. The Nakayama proposal thus marked the end of Japan’s Cold War–era policy of security isolationism vis-à-vis its East Asian neighbors. Second, the Nakayama proposal paved the way for Japan to pursue activist leadership in promoting regional security multilateralism over the following quarter century, an activism this book traces, thereby revealing the shift from a reactive and security isolationist state to a proactive regional leader.
This book thus addresses three overarching puzzles about Japan’s role in East Asian security. First, why, during the Cold War, did Japan pursue a strategy of regional security isolationism, shunning all cooperation (except with the US) and rejecting regional security multilateralism? Second, why, on the cusp of the Cold War’s end, did Japan suddenly reverse years of steadfast opposition to regional security multilateralism and propose East Asia’s first region-wide multilateral security forum? Third, why has Japan consistently championed regional security multilateralism since 1991?
Security Multilateralism in East Asia
Compared with Europe and even other regions, East Asia has historically been under-“multilateralized.” The Sinocentric tributary system used exclusively bilateral forms of diplomatic relations.5 Even during the Cold War, most regional security relations ended up being bilateral, most notably in the form of the bilateral hub-and-spokes structure of security treaties radiating out from the US hub to several countries in the western Pacific. There was very little development of a multilateral (or even trilateral) wheel rim linking these spokes. When the US initially proposed a multilateral “Pacific Pact” based on the NATO model in the early 1950s, Japan and other countries rejected the idea. Afterward the US came to prefer the hub-and-spokes structure, and to oppose all proposals for regional security multilateralism, especially un-like-minded multilateralism.6
During the Cold War, Japan largely avoided trilateral or multilateral proposals linking it with US allies, fearing entrapment in US wars. Otherwise, Japan followed US policy by rejecting proposals for multilateral security cooperation as enhancing the credibility of Soviet calls for an East Asian regional collective security mechanism and naval arms control, proposals that were considered disadvantageous for Japan and the US. Japan also feared that the development of a multilateral security mechanism resembling the 1975 Helsinki process might, as was the case with the Council on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, renamed in the early 1990s as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE), entail an implicit ratification of the territorial status quo, thereby strengthening Soviet claims to the disputed Northern Territories.7
Yet, in the early 1990s, this avoidance of regional security multilateralism suddenly disappeared with the emergence of the ARF and various track 2, unofficial, and track 1.5, semiofficial, multilateral security dialogues in East Asia.8 This blooming of East Asian security multilateralism was preceded and catalyzed by Japan’s dramatic switch in 1991 from opposing regional security multilateralism to becoming its leading champion.9 This book explains why Japan went from being passive and negative toward regional security multilateralism to becoming its major architect, in the process demonstrating a hitherto unseen independent diplomacy (or jishu gaikō in Japanese), and how this influenced regional security and Japan’s relationship with its neighbors.
This book builds on my earlier work, especially an article published in the Pacific Review that focused on the July 1991 Nakayama proposal.10 There I argued that Japan embraced regional security multilateralism as part of a reassurance strategy directed at Asian countries invaded by Japan before 1945.11 The timing of this initiative was influenced by Japan’s previous emergence as the world’s second-largest economy (an economy then larger than China’s and all other East Asian economies combined), the end of the Cold War, growing frictions with the US, Japan’s decision to play a larger role in international security after the end of the Cold War (for example, dispatching the Self-Defense Forces [SDF] overseas to participate in United Nations Peacekeeping, beginning with a deployment to Cambodia in 1992), and the goal of preventing this expanded role from provoking Asian perceptions of a revival of Japanese aggressiveness.
This book thus argues that with the end of the Cold War, Japan came to see regional security multilateralism as a vital means for reassuring East Asian nations that Tokyo’s increasing involvement in international security (for example, participation in UN Peacekeeping) would not cause Tokyo to repeat its history of aggression. Reassuring East Asian nations was recognized as necessary for dissuading political, economic, and even military counterbalancing by these countries, and hence this motivation explains Japan’s sudden burst of leadership in promoting security multilateralism in the early 1990s. The Nakayama proposal is therefore an important modification of the Fukuda Doctrine, Japan’s first formal diplomatic doctrine.
This book further argues that Japan has used regional security multilateralism to realize two other goals. First, Tokyo has used regional security multilateralism to help manage its alliance security dilemma with Washington, specifically to ameliorate new concerns about US abandonment that emerged after the Cold War, as well as its longer-term fear of entrapment by its superpower ally. Second, Japan has sought to develop new security utilities not adequately provided by the US-Japan alliance, and which Japan could not provide itself, especially in nontraditional security areas such as counterpiracy, counterterrorism, and Humanitarian and Disaster Relief (HaDR).
Significance
This book is significant for three reasons. First, this is the first book-length study of this critical turning point in Japanese security strategy, and one of very few studies that examine this case at any length.12 This study not only provides insights into an important and often overlooked turning point in Japanese policy but also offers rich case studies that show the motivations behind this policy shift and illuminates Japan’s foreign-policy-making process to a degree few other studies have attempted. It shows the role that policy entrepreneurs both outside and inside Japan played in the policy-making process. This study challenges the stereotype of Japanese security policy as being simply reactive, especially to American pressure. Tokyo’s promotion of regional security multilateralism often caused Japan to get out ahead of American policy. On several occasions, Japan led US policy away from its previous opposition to East Asian security multilateralism. In the case of the July 1991 Nakayama proposal, Japan persisted even in the face of American opposition.
Second, this book offers a more well-rounded understanding of Japan’s international role and foreign policy, especially in relation to its East Asian neighbors. Western observers commenting on Japan’s relations with other East Asian countries have focused heavily on claims that Japan mishandles its history of wartime aggression (for example, through the visits by Japanese prime ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine, and by supposedly whitewashing its history in school textbooks) and have often characterized Japan’s regional policy as inward-looking and insensitive to the perceptions and concerns of the country’s neighbors.13 This book demonstrates that Japan has a much more multifaceted relationship with, and proactive policy toward, its East Asian neighbors than has generally been recognized. As discussed earlier, this study extensively tests the argument that ameliorating historically rooted suspicions of Japan through military reassurance was one of two main objectives behind Tokyo’s promotion of security multilateralism in the early 1990s, along with keeping the US militarily engaged in regional security. In short, although Western commentators have been right to note some deficiencies in Japan’s historical reassurance, they have almost entirely overlooked Japan’s military reassurance, which is a central theme of this book.14
Finally, this book is timely because interest in regional security multilateralism in East Asia has rarely waned since the establishment of the ARF, East Asia’s first experience with regional security multilateralism, in 1993. This period has seen the establishment of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), the ASEAN Plus Three (APT), cooperation of the Northeast Asian Three (NEA 3)15 from 2003, the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia (ReCAAP) in 2004, the East Asia Summit (EAS) in 2005, the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus dialogue partners (ADMM-Plus) in 2010, and the Expanded ASEAN Maritime Forum (EAMF) in 2012. Undergirding this steady growth in security multilateralism has been Japan’s unwavering motivation to use regional security multilateralism as a platform providing it with a legitimate voice and nonthreatening means to participate in regional security.16 The consequence of this motivation has been Tokyo’s exercise of leadership in promoting regional multilateralism by building on the legacies of the Fukuda Doctrine and the Nakayama proposal, with Japan’s leadership especially notable in the cases of the APT, the NEA 3, ReCAAP, the EAMF, and the EAS.
Competing Explanations
This book tests four competing explanations. First, it considers a liberal or constructivist Asianist explanation, which holds that Japan attempted to use regional security multilateralism to build an inclusive and un-like-minded security community to distance itself from the US alliance and overcome the regional balance of power dynamics.17 An extreme variant of this argument maintains that Japan has attempted to replace the US alliance with regional multilateral security institutions. A second competing explanation claims that, for Japan, there is an inevitable zero-sum trade-off between security bilateralism and multilateralism.18 Third, this book considers a realist-inspired competing explanation that argues that Japan has used regional security multilateralism to build a multilateral coalition of like-minded countries to contain China and perhaps eventually even build a NATO-like military alliance.19 A fourth explanation claims that Japan has oscillated between extremes, initially being enraptured with enthusiasm for regional security multilateralism, but then becoming pessimistic and skeptical.20 In short, Japanese policy elites initially saw the ARF as a coequal complement to the US-Japan alliance, but later moved to the opposite extreme and claimed that the ARF could “have no effect on either state behavior or the prospects for international stability.”21
Sources and Methods
Using extensive new primary sources, this book tests the reassurance hypothesis against the competing hypotheses. While my earlier article already included significant primary research, including an interview with former foreign minister Nakayama Tarō, this book makes extensive use of a much wider array of interviews with Japanese diplomats involved behind the scenes in drafting the Nakayama proposal, as well as interviews of many of their American and ASEAN diplomatic and academic colleagues who provided feedback to Japanese diplomats on initial versions of the ideas that went into the Nakayama proposal and then, in the case of foreign diplomats, had responsibility for responding to this proposal and its follow-up initiatives on behalf of their governments. This book also analyzes for the first time an array of declassified Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) documents that I found in the Diplomatic Archives. Based on Japan’s National Information Disclosure Laws (similar to the US Freedom of Information Act), I obtained and analyzed an even wider array of previously classified documents from MOFA and the Cabinet Office (Naikakufu), including early drafts of the Nakayama proposal. These primary sources provide crucial evidence regarding Japan’s motivations for promoting regional security multilateralism, and how this translated via the policy-making process into concrete proposals.
This book also reexamines the main antecedent of the Nakayama proposal, Japan’s 1977 Fukuda Doctrine.22 This was an important step toward Japan’s promotion of regional multilateralism because it was through this doctrine Tokyo that became the first major state to recognize and deal with ASEAN itself as an important partner, and to promote that partner, rather than just dealing individually with its members. This, in turn, laid the foundations for ASEAN’s subsequent “centrality” in regional security multilateralism. This book uses declassified MOFA documents, including never-published details of early drafts of the Fukuda Doctrine speech, and interviews with former diplomats and relatives of the late prime minister Fukuda Takeo to arrive at a new understanding of the Fukuda Doctrine in the context of Japan’s regional security strategy.
This book goes beyond the July 1991 Nakayama proposal and analyzes Japan’s long-term leadership. An entire chapter focuses on the initiatives Prime Minister Miyazawa made in 1992 and 1993 and on the diplomatic process between ASEAN and Japan, and secondarily with the other members of the ASEAN Post Ministerial Conference (PMC), that culminated in the formation of the ARF in 1993.23 This chapter builds on an interview I conducted with the late prime minister Miyazawa in April 2005. It also relies on interviews with Japanese diplomats and declassified documents from an advisory panel Miyazawa created to formulate Japan’s strategy toward East Asia in the twenty-first century.
Finally, this book uses a variety of sources, including media accounts, published government documents, interviews with diplomats and academics, and declassified MOFA documents, to analyze Japan’s motivations and goals in its participation in and promotion of the ARF during the first quarter century after its establishment, as well as several other initiatives it has taken during the first fifteen years of this century to establish a wider range of regional multilateral security institutions.
Methodologically, this book seeks to understand an intrinsically important case, and only secondarily to contribute to theory development.24 It uses three qualitative methods: process tracing, the method of difference, and data triangulation. Process tracing is the analysis of chains of events in an effort to uncover causal mechanisms and sequences of intermediate variables by which a change in the value of the independent variable produces a change in the value of the dependent variable.25 One definition applied to political science that well represents the methods of this book defines process tracing as the act of examining “histories, archival documents, interview transcripts, and other sources to see whether the causal process a theory hypothesizes or implies in a case is in fact evident in the sequence and values of the intervening variables in that case.”26 In this study, process tracing will be used to see whether certain motivations, most notably reassurance, can be observed driving the policy process from planning to execution, or whether other motivations become more important during the policy process.
The second method this book employs is the method of difference, which involves examining whether change in the value of the hypothesized independent variables correlates with change in the dependent variable. In the context of this study, the method of difference answers the question, When Japan’s threat profile changes, does its reassurance policy change or remain the same?27
Finally, this book uses data triangulation, a methodology that employs more than one type of evidence to measure a variable in order to cancel out potential biases or errors in any one type of data stream.28 This study utilizes several diverse streams of data, including interviews with policy makers, their published writings, secondary academic studies, declassified and public government documents, and contemporaneous media accounts from Japan and several other countries. By using interviews with multiple policy makers, their contemporaneous writings, diplomatic documents, and media accounts, it is possible to uncover the policy-making process and the motivations behind policy while controlling for the methodological shortcomings of relying on interviews (for example, individual biases and memory lapses) by comparing accounts.29
Plan of the Book
The remainder of this book consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 presents the explanatory framework for understanding the reasons behind the rise of regional security multilateralism in East Asia in comparative perspective, and for understanding Japan’s sharp reversal from opposing regional security multilateralism to becoming its leading champion. Chapter 2 analyzes the emergence of security isolation in Japan’s regional security strategy at the outset of the Cold War in light of its neighbors’ distrust, culminating in the Fukuda Doctrine of 1977 that formalized this isolationist strategy yet at the same time attempted to open a way for Japan to play a non-security-connected political role.
Chapter 3 traces Japan’s rethinking of its strategy of regional security isolation and its opposition to multilateral security cooperation, as well as the intellectual background to the Nakayama proposal. Chapter 4 analyses the process of making the Nakayama proposal, including the crucial role played by ASEAN security intellectuals. Chapter 5 examines the delivery and contents of the Nakayama proposal itself, reactions to the proposal from other members of the PMC, and Japan’s efforts to defend and promote the initiative in response to these reactions. Chapter 6 traces the follow-on initiatives to the Nakayama proposal made by Prime Minister Miyazawa, as well as the negotiation process with ASEAN and other ASEAN dialogue partners that led to the decision to create the ARF, East Asia’s first regional multilateral forum, in 1993.
Chapters 7 and 8 analyze Japan’s behavior within the ARF and its continued leadership in promoting new regional multilateral security institutions. The final chapter draws conclusions from the case-study chapters in this book, especially those covering the Nakayama proposal, about Japanese foreign policy making in general; Japan’s success in overcoming the historically based mistrust of it as a military power; the future trajectory of Japan’s regional security strategy, including the future of Japan’s leadership in regional security multilateralism; and the implications for the US-Japan alliance.
Notes
1. ASEAN at that time consisted of six nations: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. From the mid-1990s ASEAN expanded to include four more states: Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam.
2. Japanese MOFA diplomat, interview with author, July 1991. The Fukuda Doctrine can be considered a security initiative only in the negative sense that it promised that Japan would play no regional security role. It did not even envisage Japan discussing security with its neighbors.
3. The Nakayama proposal and most, although not all, of Japan’s subsequent multilateral security initiatives were aimed at creating or expanding ASEAN institutions to deal with security issues in East Asia. This reflects the centrality of ASEAN in East Asian security multilateralism. This centrality, and Japan’s role in helping to create and sustain it, is discussed at length in this book’s subsequent chapters.
4. Christopher W. Hughes, “Japan’s Subregional Security and Defence Linkages with ASEAN, South Korea and China in the 1990s,” Pacific Review 9, no. 2 (1996): 232.
5. John King Fairbank, The Chinese World Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); David Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
6. Victor D. Cha, Powerplay: The Origins of the American Alliance System in Asia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Kuniko Ashizawa, “Japan’s Approach Toward Asian Regional Security: From ‘Hub-and-Spoke’ Bilateralism to ‘Multi-Tiered,’” Pacific Review 16, no. 3 (September 2003): 361–382; John S. Duffield, “Why Is There No APTO? Why Is There No OSCAP? Asia-Pacific Security Institutions in Comparative Perspective,” Contemporary Security Policy 22, no. 2 (August 2001): 69–95; Christopher Hemmer and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Why Is There No NATO in Asia? Collective Identity, Regionalism, and the Origins of Multilateralism,” International Organization 56, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 575–607. See Chapter 3 for a description of this early Cold War evolution from multilateral security proposals toward the hub-and-spokes structure.
7. David Youtz and Paul Midford, A Northeast Asian Security Regime: Prospects After the Cold War (New York: Institute for EastWest Studies, 1992). Also see Chapter 4 of this book.
8. A track 1 dialogue is an official dialogue among states, with government officials participating in their official capacities and representing their respective governments. A track 2 dialogue includes government officials participating in their private capacities (not as official representatives of their governments), along with scholars, journalists, businesspeople, and others. A track 1.5 dialogue is essentially a track 1 dialogue masquerading as a track 2 dialogue, where, in theory, government officials participate in their private capacities but are representing their governments de facto. Paul Midford, “Japan’s Leadership Role in East Asian Security Multilateralism: The Nakayama Proposal and the Logic of Reassurance,” Pacific Review 13, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 367–397; Hiro Katsumata, “Establishment of the ASEAN Regional Forum: Constructing a ‘Talking Shop’ or a ‘Norm Brewery’?,” Pacific Review 19, no. 2 (June 2006): 181–198; Tsuyoshi Kawasaki, “Neither Skepticism Nor Romanticism: The ASEAN Regional Forum as a Solution for the Asia-Pacific Assurance Game,” Pacific Review 19, no. 2 (June 2006): 219–237.
9. Midford, “Japan’s Leadership Role”; Yukio Satoh, “1995 nen no fushime ni mukatte: Ajia-taiheyō chiiki no anzen hoshō,” Gaikō Forum 64 (January 1994): 12–18; Masashi Nishihara, “Ajia-taiheyō chiiki to takokukan anzen hoshō kyōryoku no wakugumi: ASEAN chiiki forumu wo chūshin ni,” Kokusai Mondai 415 (October 1994): 60–68; Tsuyoshi Kawasaki, “Between Realism and Idealism in Japanese Security Policy: The Case of the ASEAN Regional Forum,” Pacific Review 10, no. 4 (1997): 480–503.
10. Midford, “Japan’s Leadership Role.”
11. Regarding Japan’s overall reassurance strategy, see Paul Midford, “The Logic of Reassurance and Japan’s Grand Strategy,” Security Studies 11, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 1–43. Regarding the ARF and (re)assurance generally, see Kawasaki, “Neither Skepticism Nor Romanticism.”
12. After Midford, “Japan’s Leadership Role,” Takeshi Yuzawa’s 2007 book dedicates seventeen pages to discussing the Nakayama proposal and eleven pages to Japan’s subsequent initiatives leading to the establishment of the ARF; see Yuzawa, Japan’s Security Policy and the ASEAN Regional Forum: The Search for Multilateral Security in the Asia-Pacific (New York: Routledge, 2007). In her 2013 book, Kuniko Ashizawa spends thirty-six pages discussing the Nakayama proposal and follow-up initiatives. See Ashizawa, Japan, the US, and Regional Institution-Building in the New Asia: When Identity Matters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 123–159. The present book makes use of extensive archival and interview sources that neither Yuzawa nor Ashizawa used.
13. Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); George Hicks, Japan’s Memories: Amnesia or Concealment (New York: Routledge, 1997); Thomas U. Berger, “The Construction of Antagonism: The History Problem in Japan’s Foreign Relations,” in Reinventing the Alliance: U.S.-Japan Security Partnership in an Era of Change, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Takashi Inoguchi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 63–84; Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Problem of Memory,” Foreign Affairs 77, no. 6 (November 1998): 37–49; Joshua Keating, “How Bad Is Japan’s Historical Amnesia?,” Foreign Policy, June 11, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/06/11/how-bad-is-japans-historical-amnes….
14. See Chapter 1 for the distinction between historical and military reassurance.
15. NEA 3 refers to the trilateral process between China, Japan, and South Korea that emerged around the turn of the century. This is also known as the Trilateral Cooperation, and features a Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat, but because of the opaque nature of these labels, this book refers to this trilateral cooperation process as the Northeast Asian 3 (NEA 3). For more on this, see Chapter 8.
16. For earlier studies making this point, see Midford, “Japan’s Leadership Role”; and Kazuhiko Togo, “Japan and the New Security Structures of Asian Multilateralism,” in East Asian Multilateralism: Prospects for Regional Stability, ed. Kent E. Calder and Francis Fukuyama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 168–198.
17. Yuzawa, Japan’s Security Policy, 7–9.
18. Ibid., 171–173; Patrick Cronin and Michael J. Green, Redefining the Alliance: Tokyo’s National Defense Program (Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1994), 21–60; Christopher W. Hughes and Akiko Fukushima, “U.S.-Japan Security Relations: Toward Bilateralism Plus?,” in Beyond Bilateralism: U.S.-Japan Relations in the New Asia-Pacific, ed. Ellis S. Krauss and T. J. Pempel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 55–86, at 78, 80.
19. This view found its clearest expression in ASEAN’s initial reaction to the Nakayama proposal. See Chapter 5. For a review of alternative competing explanations, see Yuzawa, Japan’s Security Policy, 5–10.
20. Yuzawa, Japan’s Security Policy, 150–157; Takeshi Yuzawa, “Japan’s Changing Conception of the ASEAN Regional Forum: From an Optimistic Liberal to a Pessimistic Realist Perspective,” Pacific Review 18, no. 4 (December 2005): 463–497.
21. Yuzawa, Japan’s Security Policy, 8. Yuzawa also dismisses the importance of Japan reassuring its neighbors, ibid., 168.
22. Sueo Sudo, The Fukuda Doctrine and ASEAN: New Dimensions in Japanese Foreign Policy (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1992); Hidekazu Wakatsugi, “Zenhōi gaikō” no jidai: Reisen henyōki no Nihon to Ajia 1971–1980 nen (Tokyo: Nihon keizai hyōronsha, 2006); Lam Peng Er, ed., Japan’s Relations with Southeast Asia: The Fukuda Doctrine and Beyond (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013).
23. See Chapter 6.
24. On conducting “intrinsic case studies,” see Robert Stake, The Art of Case Study Research (London: Sage, 1995). This can also be described as a disciplined configurative study, which involves using established theories to explain a case. See Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 75.
25. Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 64–65; Andrew Bennett, “Process Tracing and Causal Inference,” in Rethinking Social Inquiry: Diverse Tools, Shared Standards, ed. Henry E. Brady and David Collier (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 207–220.
26. Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel, “Process Tracing: From Philosophical Roots to Best Practices,” in Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool, ed. Andrew Bennett and Jeffrey T. Checkel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 6, quoting George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, 6. Bennett and Checkel demur that this definition may be inadequate in those cases where intermediate variables do not add to, subtract from, or alter the causal force of the independent variable, and argue that in such cases they rather constitute “diagnostic evidence.” The present book prefers the term causally neutral intervening variables. Bennett and Checkel, “Process Tracing,” 6–7.
27. Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry, 337–338; Jonathon W. Moses and Torbjørn L. Knutsen, Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 97–106.
28. Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry, 356; Sidney Tarrow, “Bridging the Quantitative-Qualitative Divide,” in Brady and Collier, Rethinking Social Inquiry, 108.
29. Layna Mosley, “Introduction: ‘Just Talk to People’? Interviews in Contemporary Political Science,” in Interview Research in Political Science, ed. Layna Mosley (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 31–44; Cathie Jo Martin, “Crafting Interviews to Capture Cause and Effect,” in Mosley, Interview Research in Political Science, 109–124.