Japan’s National Identity, Territorial Disputes and Sub-state Actors: Northern Territories/South Kuriles and Takeshima/Dokdo Compared

Abstract

This paper joins the constructivist debate on Japan's national identity and foreign policy. Mainstream constructivists that look at norms as main components of national identity have focused on Japan's anti-militarist or pacifist identity. While paying attention to the process of the emergence and institutionalisation of the anti-militarist norms their works have implied the existence of certain coherence between the intentions of the various actors that participated in this process and the final institutionalised norm. On the other hand, critical constructivists that construe identity of the national "self" as constructed in opposition to the difference of multiple "others" have focused on broad identity discourses and have paid little attention to the role of concrete issues and events in the continuous reproduction of these discourses as well as the processes through which these identity discourses emerge. This talk is guided by the critical constructivist ontology. It will focus however on the processes that led to the emergence of two territorial disputes, Northern Territories and Takeshima, as main building blocs in the discursive construction of Japan's postwar identity vis-a-vis Russia and South Korea respectively. It examines the role of sub-state actors such as municipalities and civil society groups in these processes. I will argue that while both of the final constructs are quite similar, the processes that led to their emergence have some very important differences. Furthermore, by analysing the interests of these actors the paper argues that their interests had little in common with the final identity constructs. This argument questions the ideational coherence of the process of national identity construction implied in mainstream constructivist works.