Paper short abstract:

This paper interprets Tokyo's mediation in Konfrontasi as one of the earliest instances of executive leadership in Japanese foreign policy, carried out via envoy diplomacy - a tool that bypasses institutional channels and challenges postwar narratives of Japan as an impartial 'bridge' in Asia.

Paper long abstract:

In 1964, Japan acted as a mediator in the Indonesia-Malaysia dispute (commonly known as Konfrontasi), in what was its first unilateral political initiative in Asia after the Second World War. Tokyo's mediation efforts culminated in Spring 1965, when the LDP Vice-President Kawashima Shōjirō was sent as Special Envoy of Prime Minister Satō to Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur in order to persuade President Sukarno and PM Abdul Rahman to a negotiated settlement. His endeavour (and more broadly, Japan's mediation initiative) has been generally overlooked in the scholarship of Japanese foreign policy, not least because of Kawashima's diplomatic failure.

This paper offers a new appraisal of Japan's efforts by focusing on the particular mediation strategy adopted by the Satō administration, namely the appointment of a special envoy - a diplomatic device that offers a unique insight into two of the most consequential fault lines of Japanese postwar politics: the first being the policy-making rivalry between the bureaucracy and the government, and the second the ever-contentious question of what role postwar Japan ought to play in the world, and in Asia in particular.

By drawing upon Japanese and British diplomatic archives, this paper explores the inter-institutional rivalries underpinning Japan's mediation in Konfrontasi, challenging the trope of early postwar Japan as a 'leaderless state', and highlighting the persistence of prewar practices and attitudes in the conduct of its regional foreign policy.

The paper argues that the deployment of special envoy Kawashima was - long before the presidentialization of the premiership initiated by Koizumi and now institutionalized by Abe - one of the earliest expressions of 'prime ministerial foreign policy' in postwar Japan's diplomacy, serving as an executive tool of PM Satō to de facto circumvent the Foreign Ministry's official bureaucratic structures. The paper also measures Japan's mediation in konfrontasi against the notion of 'middle power' (of which the willingness to act in 'bridging' roles in international conflicts is a defining feature) to show that Japan's mediation - heavily relying on prewar era personal networks - resembled more closely the approach of an interest-maximizing aspiring regional power rather than a selfless and impartial kakehashi (bridge).