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Paper short abstract

Japan is the only front-line US ally that both fears China and sees itself as a regional leader. The paper asks how the quiet fear of being left alone with China shapes Japan’s alliance behaviour, public narratives, and policy choices.

Paper long abstract

Debates on Japanese security policy usually focus on “normalisation”, the China threat, and the US-Japan alliance. This paper starts from a simpler point, one that is often taken for granted: Japan is the United States’ front-line ally against China, alone with no NATO-like community around it, but yet has a self-image as a “tier one” state that would not live under Chinese regional hegemony. The quiet fear of being abandoned by the US and left alone with China – a fear that cannot be stated openly in polite alliance and policy circles – nonetheless fundamentally shapes contemporary alliance politics.

The paper examines how this fear shapes Japan’s behaviour as a “reliable” ally and how it is managed in public language. Successive governments have worked hard to demonstrate Japan’s usefulness to Washington, through legal changes, military spending, build-up, and diplomatic activism, while avoiding open discussion of what US retrenchment would actually mean. Subordination to Washington is treated, implicitly, as the lesser of two evils: a way to insure against a future in which Japan must deal with China from a position of isolation and lowered status.

Drawing on speeches, white papers, Diet debates, among other sources, and focused on the post-Cold War era, the paper pays special attention to moments when US commitment seemed to waver – and how Japan responded. It shows how fear of abandonment is handled through reassurance towards the US, rather than through explicit debate about a future in which the US is less present