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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the status of Wakaizumi Kei, the international relations scholar who secretly negotiated the reversion of Okinawa from US administration in the late 1960s, in the Japanese ‘revisionist conservative’ imaginary, highlighting the impact of his legacy on the Abe administration.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade, Wakaizumi Kei – international relations scholar and secret envoy of Premier Satō in the Okinawa reversion negotiations – has emerged as a figure of semi-worship in some quarters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), serving as a hero-like figure for those political forces, championed by late Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, that were long side-lined in postwar Japanese politics as ‘anti-mainstream’ conservatism. Wakaizumi’s legacy offers a particularly apt standpoint from which to survey the tensions of the Japanese political landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, just as his contemporary rediscovery sheds light onto the core issues that fuel revisionist conservatism in present-day Japan.

Drawing on Wakaizumi’s writings and private correspondence, as well as on diplomatic documents from the Okinawa Prefectural Archives, this paper adopts an intellectual and political history approach to contextualise special envoy Wakaizumi as the ‘prophet’ of revisionist conservatism, despite his controversial diplomatic role and relatively minor academic footprint. Highlighting Wakaizumi’s influence over a broad group of ‘disciples’ in key posts in government and diplomacy from the 1970s through the present day, I examine his vision for ‘what Japan should be’ (Nihon no arikata) – namely, a proud global power leading Asia with restraint and righteousness under the US nuclear umbrella – and its influence on the Abe administration’s foreign policy thinking. Tying into Wakaizumi’s historical role as a special envoy, I also argue that the reversion of Okinawa represents the first diplomatic victory of revisionist conservatism. Besides standing out as a successful case of prime ministerial initiative in foreign policy, it also compounded three crucial themes – strategic autonomy, territorial sovereignty, and dreams of national greatness – that are still at the forefront of the conservative agenda set by Abe.