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Paper short abstract

This dissertation argues that Japan’s persistent status seeking reflects a continuous performance of the state as a “real” actor. Using a performativity approach, it shows continuity in status construction across varied Japanese governments in the period 2006–2020.

Paper long abstract

This dissertation project answers the overarching question of why Japan keeps pursuing status without end in its international relations. Concern about status is perhaps the constant in Japanese international relations, from the Meiji Restoration to the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars to the imperial pursuit leading up to WWII to the economic boom of the 1960s-80s through to the “normal state” discourse of the post-Cold War and Japan’s subsequent military buildup. Through these more than 150 years, Japan achieved much across every thinkable metric, yet status insecurities never seem to dissipate. This observation goes against traditional IR scholarship on status, which assumes a finality to status seeking. To answer the overarching question, the dissertation examines how Japanese status was produced in its international relations in the years 2006-2020. Previous research on Japanese foreign policy – a key institution in a country’s international relation – during these years emphasizes the differences between the different LDP governments 2006-2009, the DPJ governments 2009-2012, and the second Abe government 2012-2020. This dissertation therefore takes these years to be a “least likely case” of Japan pursuing status in a consistent way. Analyzing the three political sites of elite narratives, academic narratives and visual narratives, it argues that, in fact, these years saw a core continuity in the construction or “performance” of Japan as a “real actor” that is “strong”, “autonomous” and of “high rank” in international relations, the status construction that reappears perennially in discourses on Japan’s international relations at large. The dissertation employs a performativity view of “status”, where status is seen as part of “statecraft” that is constantly performed, or in other words, that which makes up the subject of the “state”. Japan’s perennial status seeking is, as such, an effort to constantly reproduce the state, more specifically as a “real actor”. The attraction toward producing the state as a “real actor” stems from, the dissertation argues, a normative commitment among actors to “autonomous individuality” as the ideal type of agency in various fields of social life, a commitment that cuts across the mutually constitutive fields of (academic) International Relations and world politics.