The Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s is delighted to convene a one-day conference exploring the theme of grand strategic thinking in Japan from a historical perspective.

The history of postwar Japan has long been dismissed as a strategic slump. Only recently the Free and Open Indo-Pacific initiative, adopted in 2016 by Prime Minister Abe Shinzō, has been regarded as a proper grand strategic framework. Yet, postwar Japan offers a particularly fruitful, and so far largely unappreciated, ground for the study of strategic thinking. The radically different domestic and international landscape faced by Japan after 1945 required policy-makers to break new strategic grounds and define new objectives – while some of the prewar strategic planning elites continued to play a central role in the definition of Japanese foreign policy. To what extent, then, did prewar strategic thinking trickle into postwar Japan? How did institutions, academic and think tank circles, formal and informal networks survive and re-invent themselves to match a radically new strategic environment?

Examining the permeability of the 1945 divide has emerged as one of the most generative concerns in historical research on Japan over the past few decades. The field of Japanese politics and policy analysis, however, has proven more reliant on the demarcation of 1945 as the ‘Year Zero’ of Japanese political history. The goal of this workshop is to harness the advances in the historiography of Japan, and the wealth of trans-war historical scholarship, to explore the changes, evolution and continuities in the ‘strategic intellectual architecture’ of Japan across the prewar-postwar divide – and place Japan in a broader and growing conversation on the historical and intellectual drivers of strategic thinking.

Speakers:

The conference brings together a diverse group of scholars with different disciplinary perspectives, from area studies and history to international relations and grand strategic studies.

• Andrew Levidis (Australian National University)
  ‘Political Mobilization Redux: On the Wartime Roots of the Liberal Democratic Party and Modern Japanese Party Politics’
• Yoshida Masumi (Mitsui Bunko)
• ‘A Maritime Nation's Business: Shipping Enterprises and the State in Interwar Japan’
• Fujita Goro (Waseda University)
  ‘Rearmament, Internal Security, and the US-Japan Security Relationship:
  A Reappraisal of Yoshida Shigeru's Strategic Thinking’
• Giulia Garbagni (King’s College London)
  ‘Old Diplomacy in New Japan: Special Envoys, Secrecy and the Search for Strategy’
• Hikotani Takako (Gakushuin University)
  ‘The “New Pre-War" Debate: Is the Long Postwar Coming to an End?’
• Kotani Ken (London School of Economics and Nihon University)
  ‘Japanese Intelligence in the 21st Century: From Stove Pipes to Integration’
• Aoi Chiyuki (University of Tokyo)
  ‘Japan as a Constructive Power: Japan's Narrative Strategy and its Origins’
• Garren Mulloy (Daito Bunka University)
  ‘Japan’s Strategic Transformation: Changing Perceptions of Arms and Values’

We are also fortunate to be joined (remotely) by Sheila Smith, John E. Merow Senior Fellow for Asia-Pacific Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, who will deliver a keynote lecture followed by a roundtable discussion with John Nilsson-Wright (University Associate Professor in Modern Japanese Politics and International Relations at the University of Cambridge), Tokuchi Hideshi (President of the Research Institute for Peace and Security) and Alessio Patalano (Professor of War and Strategy in East Asia; Co-director of the Centre for Grand Strategy, King's College London).

Organisers:

• Giulia Garbagni, AJI Postdoctoral Fellow, CGS
• Alessio Patalano, Co-director, CGS
• Thomas Stannard, Chief Operations Officer, CGS

Sponsors:

• The Japan Foundation
• Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit