This paper will be of particular interest to those specialising in postwar Japanese history, US-Japan relations, Japan's security policy, and the SDF. The pre-NPR constabularies which will be examined are those established in the Philippines, Central America and Caribbean prior to the Second World War, and the Korean Constabulary and US Constabulary in Germany, created after the Second World War. The influence of these constabularies on the NPR in terms of deployment, structure and capabilities is also explained. The policy and personal connections between the preceding US constabularies and the SDF are revealed in this paper, and within these links to constabularies established both prior to, and following, the Second World War are examined. The evidence presented here, based on research conducted in the GHQ/SCAP archives, challenges the widely accepted interpretation that the Japanese National Police Reserve (NPR), the precursor to today's SDF, was created in isolation, independent of previous US military experience, planning, and training.
It is also a function of what I call “the politics of perception”-economic ideas and imagery can influence the paths upon which decision makers produce reform policies.īritish Association of Japanese Studies Conference 2015, SOAS, London, 10 Sept 2015 This paper examines one of the central but hitherto neglected influences of the United States on the Japanese Self Defense Forces (SDF), that of the legacy of the local paramilitary constabularies created by the US in territories it occupied from 1900 to 1950. The rise and fall of Japan’s electricity deregulation is an important reminder that “political power” is not limited to votes, campaign cash contributions and organized lobbying. How did such a diffuse public interest like deregulation initially prevail over powerful interests by getting on the national agenda in the early 1990s, only then to face such an unusual degree of skepticism and resistance fifteen years later? This doctoral dissertation (title: “The Politics of Restructuring: Agendas and Uncertainty in Japan’s Electricity Deregulation”) explains the politics behind the puzzle. Indeed, what started as an almost unanimous effort to inject pro-competitive restructuring into the industry ended with an almost equally unanimous decision to cease the reform process altogether. Despite little change in real electricity prices since 1995 (its primary objective), restructuring of the industry eventually fell off the national agenda by 2007. Two further revisions would be made to the Law-the first in 1999 and the second in 2003. The revision to the Electric Power Industry Law (Denki jigyō hō, hereafter “the Law”) in 1995 was the first comprehensive revision of the Japanese electric power industry’s legislation since 1964. After centuries of evolution, Japan has now finally evolved from “unknown” to “mysterious”, to “exotic”, and to “cool”. Today, Western children grow up with “cool” Japan characters with the likes of Super Mario and Pikachu. Contemporary Japanese culture such as video games, anime and manga became adopted, adapted and normalised in the West. The final stage of evolution took place towards the end of the 20th century. Westerners were attracted to the newly arrived Japanese beauty as it was different and “exotic”. The next step of evolution occurred in line with Meiji Modernity, when the Western influences restructured Japan’s social, political and cultural systems, as this was also the time when Japanese art and consumable items started to be exported to the West, known as Japonism.
Thus, Japan largely remained little known and “mysterious” until the 19th century. Even after European arrival mainly by missionaries and merchants into Japan, the distance between Japan and Europe as well as the sakoku seclusion policy made Japan inaccessible for centuries. Although Japan has always belonged to the camp of East Asian civilisations, its existence was “unknown” in the West before Marco Polo. In order to theorise the evolution of overall Japanese aesthetics as a central argument of this project, attention, firstly, is paid to the chronological development of how the perception of Japanese culture in the West has evolved over the last 700 years.
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