scholarly journals The Historical Background to Japan’s Peacekeeping Policy from the Early Postwar Era to the Establishment of the PKO Act 1945–1992

Author(s):  
Hiromi Nagata Fujishige ◽  
Yuji Uesugi ◽  
Tomoaki Honda

AbstractIn this chapter, we will review the evolution of Japan’s peacekeeping policy from the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in 1945 to the enactment of the Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) Act in 1992. In the first section, we will look at the historical background during the postwar period (in this book, the term “postwar” denotes the period in Japan from its defeat in World War II in 1945 to the end of the Cold War in around 1990), including the rise of anti-militarism, the hidden rearmament, the establishment of the de facto ban on overseas military dispatch, the rejection of the UN’s request for the Self-Defense Forces’ (SDF’s) deployment to a United Nations Peacekeeping Operation (UNPKO) and the aborted plan to dispatch a minesweeper to the Persian Gulf. This section will also examine the Government of Japan’s legal standpoint about the possibility of SDF deployment to a UNPKO. In the second section, we will clarify how the Gulf Crisis/War in 1990–1991 made Japan abandon the taboo against overseas military dispatch. Then, we will review the course of the challenging lawmaking process of the PKO Act, which was finally passed in June 1992. Lastly, we will see the restrictions inserted into the PKO Act, such as the so-called Five Principles.

The Drone Age ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 27-54
Author(s):  
Michael J. Boyle

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the history of the development of drones. It shows that drone prototypes were in existence at the turn of the twentieth century and that their gradual development and use—either as missiles, target practice, or later, modern surveillance drones—proceeded in fits and starts. In the United States, this creation of drones was possible due to sustained investment by military and intelligence agencies, who took a risk on supporting unmanned platforms when the funds could have been devoted to manned aircraft or satellites. It reviews the history of the use of drones in World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam, and shows how drones became used in combat in the Persian Gulf War and the Balkans. Finally, it discusses the birth of the armed Predator drone, which could play a central role in the counterterrorism campaigns of the post 9/11 era.


Author(s):  
Andrew Preston

Assessing the application of the liberal consensus idea to postwar foreign policy, this chapter contends that myths about the bipartisan spirit of U.S. foreign policy have too long found ready acceptance from historians. Politics did not stop at the water’s edge, even when bipartisanship was at its supposed zenith during World War II and the early Cold War. While there was unanimity during the post-war era that the growth of international communism was a threat to U.S. interests, this did not mean that foreign policy was free of political conflict, and partisan charges that the government of the day was losing the Cold War were commonplace. Meanwhile, non-elite opinion evinced little support for confrontation with the main Communist powers, reluctance to engage in another land war like Korea, and concern about survival in the nuclear era. The divisiveness wrought by Vietnam was supposed to have brought an end to the “Cold War consensus,” but uncertainty over its meaning was evident well before this.


Author(s):  
Megan Asaka

The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.


Author(s):  
Hiromi Nagata Fujishige ◽  
Yuji Uesugi ◽  
Tomoaki Honda

AbstractFirst, this chapter will briefly review the contents of each previous chapter. Chapter 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_2 examined the historical background from the immediate aftermath of World War II to the establishment of the Peacekeeping Operations (PKO) Act in 1992. Chapter 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_3 considered the evolution of Japan’s peacekeeping policy under the PKO Act from 1992 to 2012. Chapter 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_4 investigated the transformation of Japan’s peacekeeping policy under the second Abe administration, especially during the period from 2013 to 2017. Chapters 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_5, 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_6, 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_7, and 10.1007/978-3-030-88509-0_8 considered the cases of Cambodia, East Timor, Haiti, and South Sudan respectively. Second, this chapter will analyze the consequences of Japan’s pursuit of the trends of “robustness” and “integration.” Third, we will consider possible explanations behind the withdrawal of the Japan Engineering Groups from South Sudan in 2017. Fourth, we will demonstrate that troop deployment to the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations (UNPKOs) has become commonly difficult for the Global North countries, causing a shift in focus away from personnel contributions to more material UNPKO commitments. Fourth, this chapter will illustrate how the Global North is still trying to make personnel contributions to UNPKOs wherever possible. Lastly, we will discuss what Japan can do from now on in its peacekeeping policy, or more broadly its International Peace Cooperation commitment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
Rob Wilson

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.


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